


Make That Money

by Makirela



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Bounty Hunters, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, F/F, F/M, First Time, M/M, Minor Violence
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-12-09
Updated: 2019-04-28
Packaged: 2019-09-15 09:42:32
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 6
Words: 46,264
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16930899
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Makirela/pseuds/Makirela
Summary: During her freshman year of college, Clarke Griffin heard the rumors about football star Bellamy Blake and his lizard tongue. She knew enough to stay away, and was stupid enough to fall for his tricks on a fateful October night. One mind-blowing night, an ignored friend request and a minor altercation in the self-checkout line at a Wal-Mart later, she was now all grown up, graduated and ready to embark on med school in the fall. Just one problem though...Clarke Griffin was broke and in desperate need of some cash. After a deal with the devil leaves her few options, Clarke tries her hand at bounty hunting and the first man on her hit list was none other than virginity stealing, smug looking, former football prodigy Bellamy Blake who was now a crooked cop on the run, or so it would seem. Can Clarke hunt her man down and make that money? Or will Bellamy Blake manage to expertly avoid her yet again?





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This story is based on the Stephanie Plum Novels by Janet Evanovich. The first book in this series One for the Money is absolutely hilarious and I highly recommend it. I didn't include it in the tags because there's no character crossover, just a general outline that I've used for this story. However, the first two chapters will be very similar to the book. After that, the story diverges a bit based on what I thought was appropriate for this universe.
> 
> As far as warnings go, this is a WIP so I will change the warnings as needed as the story continues. As of right now, the graphic violence warning is in place just in case based on future chapters.

There are some men who enter a woman’s life and manage to screw it up forever. Bellamy Blake did this to me—okay, so maybe not forever, but periodically.

The two of us were never supposed to meet, but fate would have it that we were to run into each other, one crisp October night during my freshman year of college. I went to school in a place as different from my hometown as possible. What felt like a grand statement against everything my parents stood for, looks more like a tired cliche once hindsight kicked in. At the time though, I felt rebellious and free, ready to make a new start for myself far away from my mother’s influence. Where I grew up, the houses were oversized, roads freshly paved and the neighbors as nosy as they come. Nothing happened in that town without everyone discussing it at the next superfluous fundraiser, and I felt like I was suffocating. I did the only thing that I’ve ever actually been good at and ran high-tail across the country to the University of Washington because, for some reason, I’d convinced myself that things had to be different in the Pacific Northwest.

What a crock of shit.

Rumblings of Bellamy Blake traveled the UW campus despite the relatively large size of the university. Of course, it was easy to know about the star running back on the football team. Nearly every girl in my freshman life science course had hooked up with him at some point during the first few weeks of classes. Considering the class had nearly three hundred people in it and half of them were female, I figured at least sixty percent of the girls who bragged about Bellamy Blake’s dick were likely lying. The fact of the matter was, the man got around and he wasn’t restricting it to just freshman. Women of all ages threw themselves at Bellamy Blake.

“I heard Bellamy Blake made Bree Larson cum so hard, she blacked out and had to be taken the hospital,” one of the girls living on my floor told a group at a party once. It had opened the floodgates of drunken confessional.

“Bellamy Blake has a tongue like a lizard and can give you an orgasm with just a look,” another girl told the group emphatically.

“I heard that he passes his wisdom on to the other guys on the football team,” someone giggled. “So you’ll likely be taken care of pretty well if you manage to get with any one of them.”

“Yeah, but Bellamy’s the one you want,” my roommate and best friend, Raven Reyes said with a knowing smile. “Once that boy gets you alone...well, you’re done for.”

“I don’t get the appeal,” I told the group haughtily. In reality, I just wanted to change the subject. I wasn’t stupid. I’d seen the way Bellamy’s arms fill out his shirt and his chocolate eyes that made your insides turn to hot fire. Though I’d never met him in person, I’d seen him in passing enough times to know that Bellamy Blake was a man who dropped panties, and the gossip chattering through the common room was enough to confirm that.

If it weren’t for the booze that had been free-flowing that night, I would have completely outed myself as the virgin that I absolutely was at the time. I’d never even seen a penis in real life, let alone had one inside me and my beat red face was a dead giveaway. Thankfully, I was a red-faced drunk and played it off despite not having touched a drop of alcohol that night. Talk of Bellamy Blake’s massive dick and adept knowledge of the female body scandalized my puritan ears, but damn if I didn’t want to know what it meant to have a tongue like a lizard.

The first time I properly met him was, of course, that fateful October night at a house party hosted by some nameless fraternity. I might have been a virgin, but I wasn’t a prude, and at that point in the semester, I still didn’t quite grasp the concept that college wasn’t an institution for getting absolutely shitfaced. I was young, and freshly independent and was learning how to appreciate the fine art of getting buzzed.

I was freezing my ass off and not nearly drunk enough, but Raven had wanted to wear matching outfits and the only thing we had that was remotely similar was a thin, black bomber jacket that barely zipped over my chest. It had also been her genius idea to wear the bodycon top that was too low cut to wear a bra with, and I was fully aware of the fact that my nipples were bursting out of the thin knit fabric in the cold.

I was a hot mess.

“You doing alright there, Princess?” A low, gravelly voice rumbled behind my ear. When I turned to see who was talking, my breath whooshed from my lungs audibly. I’d heard all enough talk about Bellamy to know that, objectively, he was attractive, but damn if that didn’t do the man justice. There was nothing objective about his toned, tanned body or the way his hair fell in messy ringlets that looked perfectly unstyled. Standing this close to him, I could smell the hint of cologne he was wearing and see the smattering of freckles that painted his cheeks. I’d known that Bellamy Blake was red hot fire, but I had no idea just how beautiful he was. He was breathtaking.

“Fine,” I squeaked after a moment too long. He hit me with a smirk that I would probably never recovered from. It was in that moment that I finally understood what Raven had meant when she told me that if Bellamy Blake got you alone, you were doomed. It wasn’t just his smirk that I couldn’t recover from. He reached around me and picked a can of beer, that was hopefully his, off the railing we were both leaning against and took a long, slow swig from it. I was mesmerized by the bob of his Adam's apple when he swallowed, and when he licked the remainder of beer off his lips, I imagined what it would feel like to have that tongue all over my body.

“You look like you’re ready to kill someone,” he chuckled. “Did someone slip up and forget her Majesty's title?”

My eyes narrowed at him, and I forced myself to think of something other than his tongue on my parts. “What’s that supposed to mean?” I snapped.

In mock defense, he held his hands up. “You just look like you’re watching your domain from high up in your castle,” he quipped at me. “You gotta learn to loosen up.”

“I can be loose,” I grumbled and groaned immediately after realizing the implication of what I said. “Not like that,” I added through gritted teeth.

“No, of course not,” he said softly, his mouth dangerously close to my ear. I leaned into it and felt myself pressing closer to him.

It took fifteen minutes for the two of us to find an empty bedroom and get undressed. I was still, woefully a virgin, and had been convinced, up until that very point, that I would be able to save that until I found someone special. Young and naive, I was still under the impression that my virginity was something to be offered to someone and not a weird, societal construct that shouldn’t define me. After that night, it certainly didn’t anymore.

With the lights off and the bed still made, Bellamy laid me down gently on top of the covers and palmed at my breast, paying special attention to my still erect nipples. His mouth worked lower and lower, stopping for just a moment to nibble on my collar bone before he had his lips on my breast sucking mercilessly on the sensitive skin of my areola.

The desperate moan that escaped my mouth was loud enough to make him chuckle.

“Gotta keep quiet for me, Princess,” he whispered into my skin. “Wouldn’t want to get interrupted.”

I let out a small whimper before shoving my fist into my mouth. My noises only became more uncontrollable as he made his way down my body, leaving a trail of wet, dirty kisses as he went. When his face was just barely below my navel, some sense came rushing back to me.

“Wait, what are you doing?” I hissed as he pressed a kiss against my inner thigh. Even in the dark, I could see the wanting in his eyes.

My breath hitched when he spoke, his words pushing soft puffs of air against my opening. “Is this alright?” He asked, his voice sounding suddenly concerned. “We don’t have to do anything you don’t want to.”

It wasn’t what I was expecting, which made it all the worse. If he’d been a jerk, I’d have no problem kicking him off me and pulling my clothes back on, but his genuine concern resulted in a fresh wave of arousal coursing through me. My heart hammered against my chest; I was a novice, inexperienced except for what I had tried on my own. Never in a million years did I think I’d have Bellamy Blake’s head in between my thighs, but the look in his eyes calmed my nerves.

“I want to,” I reassured him. “I want you,” I told him more confidently. In the back of my mind, the voice of reason in my head was reminding me that he did this with nearly anything that had two legs and a vagina, but I shoved it back into the corner where it belonged. My heart was in the moment and the heat in my belly was insatiable.

“As long as you’re sure,” he murmured against me and I let out a low, guttural groan. “Okay, okay, I get the message,” he chuckled. I could feel the smirk plastered across his face.

That was the night I learned what it meant to have a tongue like a lizard. If I had had my way, I would have cum in less than two minutes, but Bellamy knew all the right buttons to speed me up and agonizingly slow me down.

“Not yet,” he murmured against my folds and after the fifth time he brought me up to the edge, I nearly cried from frustration.

“Bellamy, please,” I begged, and, as I only understood after the fact in an embarrassing rush of realization, that was all he needed. He pumped two fingers inside me while devouring my clit. When he hooked his fingers up, he found a spot that I didn’t even know existed in my body, and I was completely undone and at his mercy. Distantly, I heard myself nearly screaming his name, but he clasped his free hand over my mouth, muffling my cry of arousal.

“Jesus, you’re gorgeous when you do that, Princess,” he groaned. As he rocked up onto his knees, I heard the crinkle of plastic as he readied a condom onto his cock. He adjusted himself so he was pressed against my entrance but made no move forward.

“You’re sure that you want this, Princess?” He asked me again.

I nodded up at him, meeting his eyes as he hovered over me.

“I’m gonna need to hear you say it,” he whispered, searching my eyes for any hesitation.

“I want you to fuck me, Bellamy,” I told him, though I didn’t know where it came from. If the look in his eyes was any indication, it was exactly the right thing to say. They went dark and hungry and he crashed his mouth against mine while he entered me slowly. I could feel my wetness plastered against my thighs; there wasn’t any friction, but I could feel the painful stretch of his cock spreading me open. I let out a small whimper.

“Does that feel alright?” He asked, his voice low and husky. I nodded into his cheek, unable to form the words coherently. It wasn’t a lie though—something about the way his cock was stretching me open felt wrong in all the best ways. There was some pain, but only in the moments where my body was learning how to mold against his thickness.

“You’re so tight for me, Princess,” he growled. “Feels so good.”

His entire length was inside me before he started to thrust out and back in lazily. One of his hands slithered between our bodies and his fingers circled my clit, working me up into a frenzy again. Skin slapped against skin, and Bellamy started to pick up the pace. My breath hitched and it was nearly impossible to hold back the moans that escaped my chest.

“That’s it, Princess, let go,” he groaned into my neck and the coil of tension that was winding itself tightly inside me sprung undone. Moments after, Bellamy twitched inside me and chased his own release with a contented grunt.

“You were so good, Princess,” Bellamy murmured as he softened inside me. “So fucking good.”

After that night, I didn’t see Bellamy at another party for the rest of the semester. In fact, I barely saw him in passing on campus, and when I did, his eyes stared pointedly past mine. Like an idiot, I’d allowed myself to become a notch on his belt and I was pretty sure that he didn’t even know my first name, let alone my last. There was no avoiding his name on campus though, especially once football season was in full swing. That season ended up being there best in fifteen years and the football team rode that high all over campus, earning the clout and the attention that they surely thought was deserved.

Bellamy was a senior when I met him, so he graduated in April of my freshman year. We never did speak about that night, and I didn’t see him again properly until three years later inside of a Wal-Mart of all places.

“Clarke? Clarke Griffin?” I heard that familiar rumbling voice ask from behind me. If nothing else, it answered my question about whether or not he knew my name. It didn’t make me feel better that he did.

Without turning around, I picked my pace up as I power walked toward the self-checkout line. It was just my luck to run into Bellamy Blake when the only reason I’d stopped at the damn grocery store was to get a pint of ice cream and a bottle of wine. There was no way in hell I was making small talk with him.

“Hold up! Clarke,” he called after me. Seeing nothing but red, I whipped around and glared at him. A younger, less temperamental Clarke Griffin had managed to delude herself into thinking she’d gotten over Bellamy Blake taking her virginity. I was older, wiser and far more irrational now. When I saw his stupid, attractive face, I only had to take two steps before I was able to stomp down hard on his right foot.

“Stay the hell away from me,” I growled before turning back around and marching up to the checkout machine. He didn’t follow me.

 

* * *

 

 

April had crashed into Seattle with a wave of unusually dry weather. West Coast springs were as unpredictable as any other time of year, which meant that more often times than not, April was spent perpetually raining. This year was an exception though, and I wasn’t about to take it for granted.

Though there was always a chance that the rain would strike without warning, I decided to risk it and let the top down of my convertible mini cooper because I was feeling wild. I’d even let my long blonde hair out of it's braid that I usually kept it tied back in and tossed on some oversized and slightly obnoxious cat-eye sunglasses on my face. In my mind, I thought I was channelling Blake Lively, but I probably looked closer to Dame Edna. It didn’t matter though; I was feeling myself. I even managed to ignore the glares from my fellow drivers as I played my music on blast for the world to hear. Everyone deserves a dose of Fleetwood Mac on a sunny, Seattle afternoon.

It was Sunday and I had a date with my best friend, a bottle of wine and a bag of popcorn in front of the TV. It was a ritual we’d kept doing after college—the only one that had lasted once we’d both become real adults (her more than me). The sanctity of the Bachelor on Sunday nights was not to be broken. I was stopped at a light and pointedly ignoring the glares I was getting from the cyclist next to me when I glanced in my rearview mirror.

“Shit,” a growled when I saw Finn Collins just two car-lengths behind me. I slammed my head back against the headrest. Finn Collins had gone to college with me and Raven and had casually managed to string both of us along, neither of us the wiser, for nearly three months before we finally clued in. He’d given me a fake name when I’d matched with him on bumble and had already been seeing Raven for six weeks at that point. The idiot hadn’t realized that we were best friends, and Raven and I had been too caught up in the whirlwind that was Finn Collins to realize it right away. He was a weasel then and he was probably a weasel now, and I wasn’t about to let a chance encounter with him ruin my perfectly good day.

I sped off from the light with probably a little too much gusto and suffered the honking that incurred when I cut across three lanes of traffic to make a right turn. It was a last minute decision and would make me a few minutes late to Raven’s apartment, but it was worth it so that I wouldn’t have to see Collins’ smug face in my rearview mirror any longer. Or it would have been if he hadn’t made the same traffic faux pas and followed me down the narrow one way that I’d turned on. When I glanced back at him, he gave me a little wave over his steering wheel and put his blinker on. The bastard was following me.

It had been nine months since I’d last run into Finn and I hadn’t exactly been itching to ever see him again. Considering the fact that I’d nearly gotten a restraining order against him, and told him just as much, I didn’t feel unjustified about the uneasiness settling in my stomach. Because I’m an idiot who goes against her gut feeling, I pulled over to the side. He was probably planning to follow me until I got to my destination, and given the fact that I was heading to Raven’s house, I wasn’t exactly comfortable with him confronting me there.

He was waiting for me on the sidewalk next to where he’d pulled over when I stepped out of my mini.

“Clarke Griffin,” he said with a grin and I resisted the urge to gag. “As I live and breath.” For a split second, I thought he was going to pull me into a hug and took a giant step backward to avoid it.

“What do you want, Finn?” I snapped.

“Come on,” he whined. “Don’t be like that.” His eyes lingered down my body and I felt a chill run up my spine. They swooped down to my feet and then crawled back up my figure before landing on my chest.

A disgusting memory of Finn’s sad sacked attempt at dirty talk flickered through my mind as I remembered how much he used to go on about my boobs. It wasn’t like they were a bad asset to have, but it wasn’t a comforting feeling to know that Finn probably remembered what they looked like in detail. I was curvy and I liked to flaunt it when I put in the effort, but I hadn’t put in the effort today which meant that the hungry look in his eyes was spurred on by memory. It wasn’t like it was possible to make out the curve of my chest in the oversized Seahawks jersey I had on.

When he realized that I didn’t have a response for him, he continued on as if nothing happened. “You’re a hard woman to track down, Clarke,” his voice clicked over the syllables of my name. Two years ago, I’d swooned at the way he said my name, but when he did it this time, I nearly gagged again.

“And you’re not exactly my number one choice for a stalker,” I growled. “I told you before, Finn, you can’t keep following me.”

His eyes darkened dangerously, and for a moment, I thought I’d gone too far. Finn had never been a violent person towards me, but I hadn’t forgotten the way he’d managed to keep tabs on me for nearly sixth months after I broke it off. I’d changed my number three times and even moved apartments, but still, he’d managed to phone me a dozen times a day. It hadn’t been uncommon for me to find him sitting in his car outside my building playing on his phone, and when I’d ask him about, he’d tell me he’d just been in the neighborhood. Raven was the one who’d snapped and dragged me to the police department, but he’d stopped coming around before I finished the paperwork for a restraining order. He’d never been violent, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t creepy.

“I’m not stalking you,” he snapped. “I need your help with something.”

I scoffed at that and rolled my eyes just dramatically enough for him to get the point. When they circled back around to center, I fixed him with a glare and rested my hand on my hip. “What in god’s name made you think that was a good idea?”

“It’s serious, Clarke,” he said.

“When is it not with you?” I groaned. “I can’t do this right now Finn. I’ve gotta be somewhere.”

“Raven’s right?” He asked, looking innocent enough. A wave of nausea rolled over me as I realized that he was still keeping tabs on me after all this time.

“How the hell do you know that?” I snarled.

“It’s Sunday. You two always used to get together on Sundays,” he told me, his voice betraying nothing. “I just assumed that hadn’t changed.”

I bit down hard on my lip and took a second to mull that over. It was certainly plausible that he was just remembering an old routine we hadn’t changed. It’s not like I’d seen his car around lately and the last time I’d changed my number, the phone calls had stopped. Overreacting was kind of my game, so I swallowed down my panic and gave him a nod.

“Right, so you know then that I’m already late,” I told him pointedly and tried to turn back towards my car. His hand reached out and grabbed my wrist and I snatched it back like I’d been hit with fire. He hadn’t hurt me, but he was trying to stop me and I wasn’t interested.

“Just hear me out, Clarke!” He begged.

I sighed and hung my head in defeat. Two minutes was all he was going to get from me. It would be worth it if it meant I could leave in peace.

“Fine,” I snapped. “Talk.”

“I’m just looking for someone to be a character reference,” he explained and I bit back the chuckle that was forming in my throat. The irony of the man who cheated on me asking me to speak to his character was not lost on me. “It’s not for court, it’s for work and I don’t have a lot of people in my life who would be willing.”

“What makes you think I’m one of them?” I nearly laughed in his face.

“I don’t,” he said bitterly. “But I know you and I know that you’ve got med school tuition due in the fall, so I know you’re desperate.”

“I’m not desperate to defend your honor,” I reminded him. “My tuition fees and your lack of personal relationships are not the same thing.”

“I’ll pay you for it,” he snapped at me. “You write me this letter, sign your name on it and if anyone calls, corroborate it, and I’ll pay you a thousand dollars.”

“Holy shit,” I exclaimed. “You’re fucking serious.” It wasn’t like a thousand dollars was going to cover my tuition, but it would cover my rent for this month and I was broke for the first time in my life. Though I had a savings account with a comfortable balance in it right now, all of that money was about to be shelled out to the University of Washington yet again to pay for med school in the fall.

“I’m desperate, Clarke,” he said quietly and I could see on his face that he wasn’t lying. “There’s no one else in my life who would do this, even for the money, and I need this to work. This is everything.”

“Can’t you just write a fake one and sign my name to it?” I asked him. “Would be a lot easier than handing me a thousand dollars.”

“I can’t have it coming back to bite me,” he explained. “I’m not about to go into details, but this is too important for me to go half-assed. If this works, that thousand dollars isn’t going to hold a flame to what I’m about to rake in.”

“Cryptic and also really sketchy,” I told him. “But if you bump it to two grand, you’ve got yourself a deal.”

His eyes narrowed slightly, but a smile returned to his face within a few seconds. “That’s more like it,” he chuckled. “I’m not going two grand into this, but fifteen hundred should probably satisfy you.”

I might have felt a little shame over the fact that I was whoring out my integrity for someone who fucked me over pretty significantly, but it wasn’t a small amount of cash. Tough times and tough measure and all that nonsense. Finn was a turd, but I didn’t think he’d actually be doing anything illegal, and my integrity had already been shot to shit. Everyone who knew anything about me knew I could be a self-serving bitch if I needed to. This was probably the easiest interaction I’d ever had with Finn Collins.

“I’ll settle for that,” I told him and extending out my hand. He accepted it and wrote down his mailing address and fax number so that I could get him the letter.

“Thanks for doing this, Clarke,” he told me. His voice sounded too sincere for it to be just a business transaction. “You’re a lifesaver.”

“I’m doing this because I need cash, Finn,” I reminded him. “Don’t turn it into something it’s not and don’t fucking follow me anymore.”

“If you gave me your phone number, maybe I wouldn’t have to,” he called after me as I slammed the door of the mini and peeled away from the sidewalk. The rest of the drive I spent debating whether I should mention the arrangement to Raven. I knew damn well that she was going to be furious with me, but I was just as desperate as Finn.

Despite having been graduated for a year, Raven still had her apartment in University Heights. She claimed it was a good location and she liked the familiarity, but it was hard to deny that she was basically an elderly person in her neighborhood now. Around her, there were frequent house parties and drunken disorderlies, but on the plus side, it kept things from getting dull. As much as I liked to tease her, the apartment was a steal for what she paid versus what she got, and I doubt anyone would give it up easily.

Even as I pulled into a parking spot on the side of the street, I noticed a group of college students already starting their pre-game. It was barely six in the evening, which I guess was find if you were nineteen and didn’t care about hangovers. The saddest part about becoming the legal drinking age when it happened to me was the slow realization that I was getting worse at bouncing back from a bender. By the time I’d turned twenty-one, I’d been drinking my liver into a slow death for years. Approaching twenty-four meant that I was asleep by ten most nights and drunk off a half bottle of wine, but I wasn’t complaining. Gone were the days where I thought pretending to hold my liquor made me cool.

“What the hell took you so long, Griffin?” Raven barked as I walked through her door. She’d already set herself up on the couch in front of the flat screen and popped a bowl of popcorn. Her glass of wine looked suspiciously low.

“I had a bit of a run in with someone,” I told her vaguely. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to tell her all about how much a douche Finn Collins was, but I knew it was still a touchy subject for Raven. Though he’d technically cheated on both of us, he’d been with Raven first and they’d been a lot more serious than we had. It was a miracle she still allowed me to be her friend after that.

I knew Raven’s apartment probably better than I knew my own considering she’d lived there for three years and I’d just barely been in mine for a year. Unlike most people I knew, Raven’s unit included a washer, a drying and a dishwasher which was unheard of for an apartment that a student could afford. She paid the same that I did, and while my apartment was basically a closet with a stove, her’s had a separate bedroom and a decent sized kitchen.

“What do you mean by a run in with someone?” Raven asked from the living room as I popped my own bowl of popcorn. Sharing was strictly off limits when it came to popcorn. It was a rule we established after Raven dumped a bowl over my head during our sophomore year. Wine had been involved in the altercation.

“I don’t want to upset you,” I admitted. It was a cop out and I knew it. Once I said that Raven’s curiosity was going to break me and I could deflect blame for telling her back onto her.

“Just spit it out, Clarke,” Raven sighed. The remote was in her hand and I could swear I saw it twitching over the play button. The Bachelor was already loaded up on the screen.

“It was Finn,” I told her before spilling the entire story. As predicted, she wasn’t the biggest fan of the idea.

“What the fuck is wrong with you?” She shouted at me. There was no heat behind it, just exhaustion. Finn had put us both through the wringer.

“I’m broke and desperate and panicking a little bit, okay?” I responded. “My fees are due at the end of August and once I start school, I don’t have any time to work and I’m going to drown in student loans.”

“You’ve got that money from your dad,” Raven reminded me. Anger flared up in my chest, but I buried it down somewhat successfully.

“That’s a limited resource and it’s just barely going to cover the four years,” I told her. I felt a bit like a broken record, even though I didn’t really owe her an explanation. Every time money came up between us, which granted, wasn’t that often, it came back to my inheritance and my background. Raven and I came from two very different worlds. "I still have to pay for rent and food and it's not like this city is cheap to live in."

“Most people don’t have education funds to fall back,” Raven tol me, as if I needed the reminder. "Student loans won't kill you."

Raven had majored in engineering at college and she was fucking brilliant. It hadn’t really surprised either of us when she’d been offered a job at NASA after completing their internship program. Her income was steady and life was comfortable, but that didn’t mean she didn’t remember her upbringing. When it came to student loan debt, Raven was far too familiar with it.

“It’s just a stupid letter,” I sighed. “I’ll send it to him in the mail without a return address and he’ll write me a check. It’s not a big deal.”

“And when he starts calling your phone fifty times a day and watching your apartment?” Raven challenged.

“Then we’ll go to the police and get that goddamn restraining order,” I promised her. “It’s going to be fine.”

We settled in on the couch and Raven restarted the episode since she’d gotten impatient enough to watch the first ten minutes while I’d been stuck talking to Finn. The show was pure trash, but it was exactly what we needed after having Finn Collins come barreling back into our lives. Petty, fake drama over a TV relationship made any problems I had seem simultaneously justified and unjustified. On the one hand, any problem that I had was definitely more significant than who was going to get a rose at the end of the episode, but on the other hand, a lot of my issues were comparable to the contestants on that show. Maybe I wasn’t quite as deep or sophisticated as I liked to think.

“Oh Jesus, is this chick for real?” Raven groaned as we watched one of the contestants toss a cosmo onto another. They were screaming about who was a better match and Raven and I were enthralled. “I mean, the guy is hot, but it’s not worth it,” Raven added.

I’m not sure exactly why we started this Bachelor ritual. It wasn’t like Raven or I were reality TV slaves; for the most part, we liked to make fun of the type of women who were obsessed with those shows. At least, we did in college before we became those women. There was something so damn entertaining about watching the drama in other people’s lives without it affecting your own.

“He looks like he’d be good in bed though,” I suggested. “And god knows I need a guy who can get me off. I’m sick of having to fake it.”

Raven let out a bark of laughter. “It’s been so long since you got any, Griffin, that you probably don’t even remember how to fake it.”

“It has not been that long,” I snapped.

“Well Finn and you stopped sleeping together almost two years ago, thank god for that,” Raven mused. “And who has there been since then?”

“I hooked up with that Niylah girl at Harper and Monty’s housewarming party three months ago!” I reminded her.

“But you left before any of the good stuff started,” Raven said with a smirk. “Admit it, Griffin, you’re dry as the sahara desert down there.”

“I’m just sick of sex for the sake of sex,” I explained. “Sex is always awkward and weird and I just want to find someone who’s going to stick around and want to make it good.”

“I don’t know about that,” Raven drawled. “Weren’t you and Bellamy Blake complete strangers when he gave it to you the best you ever got? Those were your words, not mine.”

“Shut up! That’s not the same thing and you know it,” I growled. I should have never told Raven about what happened between me and Bellamy. At the time, I’d needed to vent, but years later she was still holding it over my head. It wasn’t my fault that Bellamy’s clever fingers and experienced tongue had had enough practice to bring me to pieces. Any woman who slept with him probably felt the same.

“Besides, you’re one to talk,” I snapped at her with a devilish grin. Her eyes had already started to roll before I could finish my thought. “You refuse to call that Wick guy back even though you know the sex with him is good and you guys get along. If I have to talk about my lack of a sex life, you have to talk about why your lack of a sex life is self imposed.”

“No I don’t,” Raven said, turning her head back to the screen. It was the final ceremony of the episode and one of the contestants was already crying.

“Suit yourself,” I said with a smirk. “But you know in your heart that Wick’s got real potential.”

Kyle Wick was an engineer who Raven had met through work and was head over heels in love with her. I’d only met him twice, but both of those times, he’d been following Raven around her apartment like a puppy. After everything had gone down with Finn, Raven and I had sworn off men for a while. In my case, that worked out fine because it just so happened that I swung both ways, but Raven was painfully straight, not for lack of trying. It had been a while since she’d let a guy take her out to dinner, let alone end the night in her bed. Ever since, she’d been avoiding Wick like the plague.

I emptied the bottle into both our glasses as the episode faded to black and we watched the credits roll down the screen for a bit. Truth be told, neither of us had paid much attention to what had gone on, which was the exact appeal of shows like the Bachelor. You didn’t actually have to know anything to watch it; next week, there would be all new drama and petty fights and roses to give out and it will be like this week’s episode never even happened. After the episode was usually our catching up time, but I’d sort of cut that out at the knees when I’d dropped my big news as I walked through the door. Compared to Finn Collins making a habit of stalking me again, my other news seemed boring.

“Listen, I know you don’t want to talk about it anymore,” Raven started and I let out a groan before bringing my glass up to my lips for a lengthy gulp.

“Don’t start,” I told her.

“If it’s money you’re worried about, I think I have a solution for you,” she said quickly and of course, that peaked my interest. I wasn’t a freeloader, I had a job, but working part time at a domestic violence center didn’t really pay the bills. I’d been flip-flopping back and forth between getting a part time gig for minimum wage, but I wasn’t completely convinced I wanted that. Anything else in my field required more experience or qualifications, and I wasn’t really looking for something permanent anyways.

“Fine, what’s your idea?”

“I ran into John Murphy at the bar the other night,” she told me. “He mentioned that he’s looking for some help around his new office, and I laughed in his face, but now with this Finn thing…”

Murphy was about as slimy as they come, but in a predictable, sleazy way. With Murphy, you knew exactly what you were getting. His eyes roamed a little too low when you talked to him, and there was a permanent smirk plastered across his face, but he was straight with you about most things. After a couple of drinks, he even could be pretty funny, but he wasn’t exactly my favourite person in the entire world.

“What’s he paying?” I asked before hauling my phone out and adding his number into my contacts.

“Probably minimum wage,” Raven said with a shrug. “But he’s pretty flexible about hours I think, so you’ll be able to work it around the DV center.”

If this was going to get Raven off my back about Finn, I’d give it a shot. I had no intention of breaking off my arrangement with Finn though, but she didn’t need to know that. It had been a mistake to tell her in the first place, but at least something good came of it.

I wasn’t exactly ecstatic to be begging John Murphy for a job, but I also wasn’t feeling very picky. Something temporary was exactly what I needed and this had the added bonus of not requiring a hair net as a part of the uniform.

“Best part is that Murphy’s a good lay, so if you’re ever feeling—” I slapped my hand over Raven’s mouth and shot her a look.

“I think that’s enough out of you for one night,” I told her. I’d sooner set myself on fire than get into bed with John fucking Murphy.

 

* * *

 

 

By the end of the evening at Raven’s, she’d somehow convinced me to go see Murphy. The prospect of working as a receptionist for him wasn’t particularly appealing, but Raven was persistent and I wasn’t feeling stubborn. 

The faint sounds of sirens blasting through my open window woke me with a start and a rolled over closer to my bedside table to get a look at my phone. Nine o’clock was as good a time as any, I suppose, to be woken up, but I wasn’t exactly chipper about it. On days where I didn’t have shifts at the domestic violence center, I didn’t have much else going on. As much as staying in bed felt like the best option for my day, I resigned to facing the morning like a champ and pulling myself out of bed.

I shuffled into my bathroom and took a piss that could cure cancer and stepped into the shower before it had completely warmed up, hoping it might jolt me out of my morning funk. It didn’t. Instead, I got out of the shower feeling more funky and definitely hungrier than when I’d gotten in. When I shuffled into my kitchen, I sent a silent prayer out to the food fairies, hoping that they had visited the night before.

They hadn’t.

My refrigerator wasn’t entirely empty. There was a box of IPA in the back corner and a box of half eaten pizza that I pulled out and finished off at my counter. Next to the pizza was one of those boxed salads that had turned into a puddle of black sludge a few weeks ago. I was too scared to touch it for fear of a biohazard, but I made a point of steering clear of it when I grabbed the pizza.

I hopped into my mini and drove straight to Murphy. It had been years since we’d seen each other, but Raven said his business was legitimate and I trusted her enough. Maybe I shouldn’t trust her judgement when it came to Murphy, but she’d seemed confident enough. When I pulled up outside the building, it didn’t look like a crack house which was more than I expected. I pulled the key out of my ignition, double checked my doors were locked and did a quick scan around the parking lot to make sure no one I knew was hanging around. There was a sign hanging over the door that looked like it had been repainted using old house paint that read “John Murphy’s Bail Bonding Company” in blocky letters. Next door there was a auto repair shop that looked suspiciously empty for ten o’clock on a Monday morning. The building to the other side had a sign hanging in the window advertising a massage therapist. Something about it screamed happy endings, but I wasn’t going to hang around long enough to find out if that was actually the case.

A tiny bell rang to announce my presence as I walked through the door and I glanced around the office to get a feel for what I was walking into. It wasn’t a big space, but it’s not like I knew how big a space bail bonding needed. There was a couch that had seen better days in the back corner of the room, a desk planted in front of the big front window, and a door in the back that likely lead to Murphy’s office. The space looked like it came straight out of some poor grandmother’s basement, complete with panelled wood walls and a shag carpet that had probably once been white. There was no telling what exactly had been dragged across the floor in this place.

A small but intense woman sat behind the desk with a phone pressed against her ear. When she glanced up at me, I noticed the tattoo that curled around one side of her face, but did my best to keep my expression neutral. I wasn’t about to go and offend her when I was technically here to interview about a job.

“Can I help you?” She asked, an eyebrow raised.

“I’m looking for John Murphy,” I explained. “My name’s Clarke Griffin and we were friends back in college.” Friends was a loose term, more like reluctant acquaintances. Somehow Murphy had managed to get into the school of business, so our paths cross at UW more than I would have liked. Raven had always had a soft spot, and our circle of friends overlapped some, but no one in the right mind would have ever describe us as friends.

“His name’s on the door, sweetheart, everybody who comes in here is looking for Murphy,” she said, making it sound like a challenge.

“I’m here about a job,” I tried to explain further. “A mutual friend of Murphy and me told me he was looking for a receptionist.”

“Does it look like he needs a receptionist?” She asked me, and I realized that she had a point. All signs were pointing to this woman being his receptionist.

“Raven didn’t really specify the type of job I guess,” I mumbled. “She just said that Murphy was hiring.”

“He is, just not a receptionist,” the woman told me.

“I’m assuming you’re the receptionist then?” I asked, not really sure of what else I was supposed to say. She wasn’t really giving me a lot to work with.

“Oh, hell no,” the woman said with a bark of laughter. “Murphy’s got me filling in for the day because I’ve got a heart of gold, but I’m not the usual person. He’s out sick with a cold.”

“So you’re what then, his girlfriend?” I’m not sure why I asked. It was none of my business, but other than the face tattoo, this woman was actually decently attractive and that wasn’t exactly Murphy’s usual type. Except for Raven of course.

“None of your business,” she said, but I wasn’t getting an angry vibe from her, more of a superiority vibe which I wasn’t super in to. “Listen, between you and me, you don’t want to be a receptionist here. It’s thankless work and shit money, and the people who come through here aren’t exactly members of the country club, if you know what I mean. But you know, there’s a Macy’s looking for some makeup counter girls just down the road from here, and I think you’d fit in real nice over there.”

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?” I snapped, placing a hand on my hip. I might not have a face tattoo, but I sure as hell wasn’t a pushover. If I wanted to be a receptionist at a bail bonding office, I damn well was going to do it.

“It just means that I don’t think you’d like working here very much,” she told me.

“I don’t really care where I work,” I said. “As long as I’m getting paid, the job doesn’t really matter.”

Her face lit up at that and she smirked at me. “You serious about that?” She asked.

“I mean, yeah I guess,” I said, feeling slightly less confident. I drew the line at a few things, running coke being one of them. Murphy was a lot of things, but I was pretty sure he wasn’t a drug slinger.

“If you’re really looking to make some cash and don’t care much about the work, you should talk to Murphy about doing some skip tracing. You’ll make bank and you don’t have to pretend to be nice to lowlifes and criminals. Something about you tells me you wouldn’t be good at making small talk with lowlifes and criminals.”

“How much bank?” I asked.

“Ten percent of the bond,” she told me. “The last guy I brought in made bail at $50 000, which means I brought home five of that. We got a guy on top here who didn’t show up to a court and his bail was $100 000. You do the math on that one.”

“$10 000?” I exclaimed. Holy shit, that could cover my rent for a few months and some. I wouldn’t have to dip into my college fund at all. “Ten thousand cash dollars for finding one guy? What’s the catch?”

“I mean, most of the guys who skip town don’t exactly want to be found,” she said. “So it’s not always as easy as knocking on their door. Usually the bigger the money, the bigger the crime. So you’ll still be dealing with lowlifes and criminals, you just won’t have to be nice to them.”

“The guy they brought in yesterday is a friend of Murphy’s, so he probably won’t be too hard to track down. One of the boys started working the case when it came in, but he’s otherwise incapacitated now.”

“What’s that mean?”

“His wife caught him cheating on her and nearly cut his dick off,” she told me, face completely deadpan. My mouth dropped open. “They had to take him to the hospital and stitch it back together.”

“Well I don’t have a wife and I don’t have a dick, so I guess I’m doing better than that poor bastard,” I sighed, running a hand over my face. I felt bad for the guy’s dick, but it couldn’t have worked out better for me. Murphy needed someone to fill his shoes, and I needed the cash. It was a no brainer. “If you do this sort of thing too, why aren’t you looking for this guy? Don’t you want that ten grand?”

“I got bigger fish to fry,” she told me. “Besides, I’m not really into the trigger happy variety of criminal. I’m not a fan of getting shot.”

“Getting shot?” I squeaked.

“It doesn’t happen often,” she reassured me. “And you’ll probably be fine. Just remember to shoot back and duck. After a while though, it gets hold so I’m taking a break.”

It seemed like pretty sound logic, and it wasn’t like I couldn’t get shot living my life right now. There was always a possibility that a lunatic with a gun might take me out while I’m walking down the street. Of course, I’d never been a position where I was planning to chase down the lunatic with a gun, but ten thousand dollars was a pretty good incentive. I could pretty much get on board with anything for ten thousand dollars.

“Okay, I’m in,” I told her.

“You gotta talk to John first, but I’ll vouch for you,” she said, swivelling in her chair and leaning towards the office door. “Get your ass out here, John!”

John Murphy was a thin man with a pointed face and hair that was in desperate need of a haircut. When I’d known him in college, he’d been a liar and a cheat who conned his way through school and managed to graduate with his degree despite everything in the universe pointing towards that being impossible. In the years since I’d seen him, he didn’t look like he’d changed much, except for the fact that instead of basketball shorts, a muscle tee, and Adidas slides, he was wearing a pair of slacks, a polo shirt and a pair of loafers that had definitely seen better days.

“Clarke Griffin?” He asked when he stepped out of the office. “What the hell is she doing here Emori?” He said to the woman I’d been speaking to. I mentally took note that her name was Emori. We never had introduced ourselves.

“Clarke here wants to do some skip tracing,” Emori told him. “She looks like she might actually be decent at it.”

“No way. Too dangerous,” Murphy said. “Clarke and I go way back. She’s not fooling me with her tough act.”

“It’s not a tough act, Murphy,” I snapped at him. “Or did you forget that time I nearly broke your arm?”

His eyes narrowed at me. I probably shouldn’t have reminded him of that particular instance if I wanted him to give me a shot, but hindsight and all that.

“Most of my agents used to be in security or in the army. There’s twisting a college frat boy’s arm behind his back and then there’s taking out a wanted criminal. Not the same thing.”

“Come on, John,” Emori said. “She looks like she’s got spunk.”

“You don’t know the half of it,” Murphy chuckled, his eyes twinkled with memories of drunken nights from back in the day.

“I need a job, Murphy and Raven told me you were hiring.”

“This isn’t exactly what I was looking for when I told her that.”

“What were you looking for?”

“I wasn’t looking,” Murphy grumbled. “I was just making small talk.”

“Look, I don’t want to make things hard on you, but I’m really desperate here,” I told him. Sliding my phone out of my pocket, I opened it up and started sifting through old photos. When I found what I was looking for, I held it up for him. “We’re still friends on facebook which means when I post this, all our mutual friends are going to see it and know exactly what this is. I won’t do it unless you make me.”

Murphy stared at the screen in horror. “You told me you deleted that,” he hissed at me.

“And you told Raven that you were looking to hire and now you’re taking it back, so we’re both liars.”

“Not the same thing!” He repeated, his voice raising an octave. “You’re a real piece of work, you know that Clarke?”

“I’ve been told once or twice in the past,” I said with a smirk.

“Fine! You can have a few civil cases. Make a few phone calls if you really need some cash.”

“Nuh uh,” I said with a shake of my head. “I want this one.” I stabbed my finger down on the file Emori had told me about. Ten thousand dollars was going to change my life, and I wasn’t interested in playing around.

An evil grin spread across Murphy’s face and it struck fear into my heart. Murphy was a shit disturber. If there was meddling to do, he’d be there in a flash to do it. A grin like that could mean only one thing: He knew something I didn’t.

“You sure you want this one? The guy is the lowest of the low. A cop gone rogue or something along those lines. Unpredictable. Dangerous.”

I’d just told him it didn’t matter. God, he was annoying.

“I don’t give a shit. I need the money.”

“Well I can’t just leave this one to you on your own,” he sighed, but it was forced and the grin hadn’t wiped from his face. “But I guess I’d be willing to give you a shot if you really, really want it. No takesies backsies though. You gotta promise to put in some real effort. I don’t get this guy back and I’m one hundred grand in the hole.”

“Yeah, yeah, whatever,” I told him with a wave of my hand. I didn’t care too much to hear about Murphy’s plight.

He smirked harder and I thought the look was going to give me an aneurysm. “It’s all yours, Griffin,” he told you. “At least for a week, and when you fail, then you gotta pass it off.”

I snatched the file out of his hand. Before I opened it up, I asked, “Who am I looking for?”

A hearty, full laugh left Murphy this time before he dissolved into giggles. After a few calming breaths, he managed to choke out, “Bellamy Blake. The guy you’re after is Bellamy fucking Blake.”

I felt my heart bottomed out in my chest and played back the last few headlines I’d read over in my head. Distantly, I remembered Bellamy being involved in a murder, but he was a cop and that sort of shit happened all the time. I figured he’d just been on duty. To be perfectly honest, his name was in headlines often enough that I actively avoided reading about it. After all this time, a dull, painful rage still rose in my throat whenever I thought about Bellamy Blake.

I glanced over the file and started piecing together the puzzle. SEATTLE’S BEST KILLS UNARMED MAN. That was the headline in the Seattle Times from nearly four weeks ago. Seattle was a big city and talk of Bellamy Blake might have been going on around me, but not in a way that I was ever aware of. Our circles had only ever crossed that one time, and save for Raven, I wasn’t really in touch with a lot of people from college. I hadn’t realized that Bellamy had been charged with murder.

“Bet you weren’t expecting that one,” Murphy quipped as I continued flipping through the papers.

“You set me up!” I snapped at him.

“You’re the one who practically begged for the file,” he reminded me, and I gritted my teeth. “If you’d given me the chance, I might have mentioned who I posted bail for.”

“What the fuck would even do that for?” I asked. “He’s a dirty cop, Murphy.”

“Innocent until proven guilty, no?” Murphy mused. “And besides, Blake isn’t a bad dude. I didn’t think he was going to skip town.”

“I didn’t realize you two even knew each other,” I grumbled.

“Not well,” Murphy said. “Not as well as you two know each other.” he wiggled his eyebrows at me.

I didn’t know how much Murphy knew about my relationship with Bellamy—or lack there of— because I definitely hadn’t been the one to tell him any details. Apparently, he knew Bellamy better than he was letting on, or Bellamy talked more freely about his conquests than I had previously thought.

 It didn’t matter. It was a job and I’d be damned if I wasn’t getting my ten thousand dollars.

“There’s still time to back out of this,” Murphy told me. “We never did shake on it.”

“Fat chance, Murphy,” I snapped. “I’ll bring you Bellamy Blake if it fucking kills me.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I had this chapter pretty much finished right after the first one, so that explains the quick update. I'm aiming to get two chapters out per week, but it's also finals season, so who knows how that's going to go. Anyways, thanks for reading! Hope you enjoy!
> 
> This series is based on the Stephanie Plum Novels by Janet Evanovich. The first in the series is called One for the Money and I highly recommend it to anyone who enjoys the style of this fic.

* * *

 

Before I left Murphy’s office, Emori had me fill out a couple sheets of paper. “Insurance purposes in case you get shot,” she’d brushed it off as, and I tried not to let that make me nervous. “Jasper will be back tomorrow and he’ll phone you if he needs anything else.”  
I slid back into my car and tossed Bellamy’s file down on the seat next to me. I needed a moment to gather my thoughts before I could handle looking at it in more detail. The number of times I’d reminded myself that this was just a job was embarrassing. It was proving difficult to convince myself that that was true.

Bellamy Blake didn’t have to mean anything to me though. Sure, I’d slept with him once and that had been my first time. Sure, he’d told me how amazing it had been and that I was different, but hell, he probably told that line to every single girl whose panties he’d taken off. I wasn’t special, so I shouldn’t be treating him like he was special. Years had gone by. My heart shouldn’t beat just a little bit faster at the thought of seeing him again.

Plus, he was a goddamn criminal now. Figures that he would be. Bellamy had always looked bad to the bone in a way that was irresistible. Dark eyes, darker clothes and an affliction for things that just weren’t healthy. Yeah, I could see him being a criminal even though up until a few minutes ago, I thought he’d made a lot of sense as a cop. I’d gone through a lot of effort over the years to not think about him at all. I tried not to think about the way his lips felt on my body when I was getting myself off and I tried desperately to forget all the filthy things he said to me when he was inside of me.

I tried not to think about the fact that I thought what had happened between us had meant something to him just like it meant something to me. It wasn’t technically his fault even since I hadn’t mentioned to him that I was a virgin when it happened. He probably thought we both got the same thing out of it, and that was that. And the way he refused to meet my eyes for the rest of the school year after that was coincidental.

Yeah, Bellamy Blake was a bastard, but he was an insignificant bastard. He didn’t have an effect on me anymore, and I was over my stupid, school-girl crush I had five years ago.

If I said it enough times, eventually it would be true.

I flipped through his file past the first article that I read earlier. I studied the photos in more detail, trying to get a read on what was different about him now. His mugshot wasn’t a good indication, since he looked damn near psychotic in the photo, though I figure most people do. It’s hard to look calm and collected when you’ve been arrested for murder. There was a candid of him smiling that looked more natural and one where he was dressed in uniform obviously taken from the police department. He still held himself tall and confidently and his hair was still perfectly imperfect. It was shorter now though and slightly tamer, probably because he was a real adult now with a real job. His face was the same; his bone structure was still frustratingly angular and there were freckles still splattered across his cheeks. There was a new scar just above his upper lip that I didn’t recognize. I could see it in the police photo, but he’d disguised it with facial hair in the candid shot. He’d grown a beard out since I’d last seen him, and I hated the fact that it looked good on him.

Tossing the stack of papers back onto my passenger seat, I resigned to the fact that Bellamy Blake was always going to be good looking and I wasn’t about to let that distract me. After a quick glance to confirm the address on his file, I turned the key over in the ignition to start my car. It wasn’t particularly close to Murphy’s office, nor was it in an area I was expecting Bellamy to live in. The neighborhood was residential and his street was lined with a canopy of trees. When I pulled into the driveway of a quaint, two-story house, I double checked the file to make sure it was actually correct.

I sat there feeling stupid and inept for a moment, realizing that I hadn’t really thought this part through. If Bellamy was actually in there, what exactly was I going to do? I didn’t really expect him to be home. Someone on the run from a murder charge probably wasn’t hanging around in a house that he’d bought in his name. Still, I was pretty out of my element here. Murphy hadn’t exactly been wrong when he’d snarked at me that I wasn’t cut out for stuff like this. I didn’t know the first thing about finding a criminal. Isn’t that what the police were for?

With a fake confidence in case anyone was watching me, I stepped out of my car and approached the door. Instead of knocking, I took a moment to gather the mail that had stacked up in the box next to the front door. With a quick glance at the address line, I was able to confirm that this was, in fact, Bellamy’s house. That didn’t make me feel much better. Most of the envelopes looked like bills and advertisement, which I guess made sense. No one got actual mail these days unless it was from Amazon.

Hesitantly, I knocked on the door and then rang the doorbell, not expecting anything to come from it. My heart flipped in my chest when I heard footsteps on the other side. Someone was in there which meant someone was about to answer the door. Bellamy wouldn’t be stupid enough to answer his goddamn door.

I considered sprinting back to my car and driving away, but waited for a second too long. By the time I was prepared to turn and run, the door was opening.

“Leave me the fuck alone!” A woman’s voice growled as the door swung open.

My mouth dropped open when the drop-dead gorgeous brunette who was probably a model on some sort of social media site came into view. She was athletic and looked like she could take me out with a swift punch to the gut. Her long, dark hair was pulled back in intricate braids and her face was all angles. If it weren’t for the scowl, I’d think she was about to do a photo op for a yoga studio.

“I’m looking for Bellamy Blake,” I said politely, though I probably should have thought of something more clever. Anyone in his house would probably know that everyone was looking for Bellamy, and probably weren’t going to be super forthcoming with information on him.

“You and everybody else,” she snapped at me.

“We went to college together,” I told her. It wasn’t technically a lie. Bellamy and I did go to college together, but that wasn’t the reason I was looking for him. “When I saw his name come up in the paper recently, I thought I might try to reconnect after all these years.”

“Right, so you see my brother get charged with murder and think to yourself, damn I should look that guy up and see how he’s doing?” She looked at me incredulously. It was a bad story, I’ll admit that, but I didn’t have time to feel embarrassed about it. I hadn’t heard anything past her saying that she was Bellamy’s sister.

“Bellamy is your brother?” I asked in shock. It wasn’t like I knew him all that well, so I don’t know why I was so surprised by the information. I knew a fair bit about him though. I liked to think I would have known if he had a sister who looked like she was supposed to be walking the red carpet at the academy awards.

“Guess you don’t know him all that well,” she scoffed. “Yeah, he’s my brother and he isn’t here so why don’t you go fuck off and bug someone else who’s got time for this shit.”

That girl had a mouth.

“What’s your name?” I asked. All pretense of subtly had completely gone out the window. Whoever this girl was, she wasn’t in any of the documents on Bellamy that I had and I’d never heard a single thing about her. Considering the rampant gossip I’d heard about Bellamy, even after he’d graduated, I found that pretty hard to believe.

“None of your damn business,” she snapped.

“Come on,” I said, trying to sound a bit more sincere. “I’m not trying to hurt your brother or ruin his life. I’m just worried about him and want to check in. I thought maybe we could exchange numbers and you could let me know if you need anything.” That was a lie, and hurt a little bit. As much as I wanted to be a better person, ten thousand dollars was ten thousand dollars. I needed that money, and I couldn’t be worried about breaking the trust of some random girl who I didn’t even know existed.

Her face faltered for a second before the cool mask was replaced. “My name’s Octavia, but it doesn’t matter. I’m not telling you anything about my brother.” The door slammed in my face with a sound loud enough to make my ears ring. I probably deserved it.

I definitely deserved it.

I was resigned to slink my way back to Murphy’s, but something caught my eyes. In the window of Bellamy’s house, I could see Octavia peaking through the blinds. It wouldn’t have seemed all the suspicious if I hadn’t looked into my rearview mirror. She wasn’t looking at me or my car, she was making eye contact with some guy across the street.

I whipped my head around and got a better look at him. Something about him seemed familiar, but I couldn’t quite place him. There was a beanie covering his head and dark sunglasses shielding his eyes. It took me a minute longer than it should have to recognize Nathan Miller, but once I realized that he was trying to be inconspicuous, it was easy to piece it together. Miller and Bellamy had been nearly inseparable in college. Though I never met him, Bellamy’s reputation managed to shine attention on to the people he was closest with, including Nathan Miller.

If Miller was looking shady and texting Octavia Blake, that probably meant he knew something about where Bellamy was. I wasn’t about to waste that hunch on confronting him like I’d done with Octavia. I needed to be smart about this.

I pulled out of the driveway and tried to make off like I was leaving. When I rounded the corner, I quickly threw a jacket over my t-shirt, tossed my hair into a ponytail, pulled a baseball cap over my head and hopped out of my car. Feeling a little bit like a creep, I snuck into some bushes where I could see Blake’s house without being directly visible from the window. As I suspected, Miller had gone up to the front door and was chatting with Octavia. It looked like whatever was going on was pretty intense, from the way Octavia was wildly waving her hands, but I didn’t know either of them well enough to be sure. Maybe Octavia Blake was a hand talker.

I knew enough to know to keep out of sight when Miller turned down the driveway and started walking down the street. A small part of me panicked when I realized that he was getting into a car. At a sprint, I made it back to my mini, winded, and managed to peel out onto Octavia’s street just as Miller was turning down another. It wasn’t exactly difficult to track him after that. The area wasn’t busy enough and Miller wasn’t being cautious enough to lose me. When he merged onto a busier street, I kept three car-lengths behind him and followed him through traffic. After about ten minutes, he pulled into the parking lot of a cheap motel that had never seen good days, let alone better ones. A letterboard sign advertised hourly as well as weekly rates and underneath that, the words ‘no vacancy’ lit up bright in neon pink.

Instead of parking in the lot next to Miller like an idiot, I kept my distance on the street and watched with my hat held down over my face. He approached a room on the bottom floor and knocked a few times. When the door open, Miller slipped in, but I didn’t get a good look at who answered. At the distance I was, I had a hard time making out much more detail, but it had to be Bellamy. It was all too convenient for it to be anyone else, especially since Miller walked in with a black duffel bag and returned empty-handed a few minutes later. Miller got into his car and left.

Oh boy. A lead.

There was a high chance that Bellamy was sitting on his ass inside that skanky motel room just waiting to be picked up, which meant I had two viable options in front of me. My rational brain was reminding me that I was inexperienced, unarmed and also pretty weak in comparison to someone like Bellamy Blake. If I went in there and confronted him myself, I’d likely make an idiot of myself, or even worse, he’d actually end up hurting me. I didn’t really think he would, but I also didn’t really know Bellamy all that well. Meeting his sister earlier that day was proof enough of that.

My other option was calling the police and letting them deal with it. And while I was more inclined to go with that, the nagging feeling that I didn’t really know anything for sure was itching at the back of my mind. If I called the cops and it was some innocent, non-Bellamy, person sitting in that motel room scratching his balls, I’d make an even bigger fool of myself. Plus, once I actually did find Bellamy, they’d probably be less willing to help me.

I needed to confirm he was in there, and then phone the cops.

I sucked in a breath and slithered out of my car, trying my best to look like I belonged, though that probably wasn’t a good thing at a motel that offered an hourly rate. I pulled the hat off my head a ripped the elastic out of my hair. In a feeble attempt at making myself look better, I tried fluffing my hair out before reminding myself that I didn’t care about what Bellamy Blake thought of me. I was here to apprehend him, nothing else.

I placed three knocks against the door and waiting, heart in my throat, for him to answer. The bolt slipped back and the door yanked open and I found myself face-to-face with Bellamy fucking Blake.

He was leaned into the door so I could only see his face and not any further into the room, and he looked genuinely pissed. A sudden realization came over me that this was the first time I was properly looking at him since we’d slept together. I hadn’t bothered taking a good look when I stomped on his foot in Wal-Mart and I hadn’t exactly had a lot of other opportunities to see him since.

He was harder than I remembered. The lines of his face sharper, and the look in his eyes didn’t make me want to melt like it used to. The line of his mouth was thin and his eyes had an angry flare in them. The boy I’d remembered had been a star football player and carefree party goer, but the man standing in front of me had seen some shit. My heart ached for a moment before I squashed down those lingering feelings.

“What do you want?” He snapped at me.

“I’m looking for Reese Lemkin,” I told him. I learned my lesson with his sister. I wasn’t about to tell him the truth.

“Reese Lemkin, huh?” He asked skeptically. His eyes narrowed and for a split second, I considered bolting back towards my car.

“Yeah that’s right,” I continued. “I was told she was staying here.”

“Is that so, Princess?” He asked me and I felt my insides clench, including my lady parts. My mouth fell open at the nickname and I quickly snapped it shut before I gave him the wrong idea.

“Don’t call me that,” I snapped. “I didn’t expect you to recognize me.”

“You shouldn’t have expected me at all,” he reminded me. “You’re looking for Reese Lemkin, remember?”

Oh right, my stupid lie. I could still play this off though.

“Right, Reese,” I said. “Clearly, I got the wrong apartment, so I’ll just get out of your hair.”

“There’s no one name Reese Lemkin staying at this place,” he scoffed at me.

“How could you possibly know that?” I asked him incredulously.

“Because that’s the worst fake name I’ve ever heard in my life, and that’s saying something because I’m a cop,” he said. “My foot is starting to ache just looking at you, so I’d appreciate it if we cut this short. What are you really doing here, Clarke?”

I glared at him and cocked my hip out to the side. I didn’t owe Bellamy Blake any sort of explanation. For all he knew, he’d just insulted the real Reese Lemkin. “I made an honest mistake and got the wrong room,” I lied through my teeth. “I gotta get going, but it was a nice surprise to see you.”

His hand whipped out and he grabbed my arm, stopping me from turning away. “Not so fast, Princess,” he growled. “Tell me what you’re doing here.”

I needed to get out of his sight and get to my cell phone. If I could make a call to the police, I might be able to get Bellamy picked up before he took off again, but I couldn’t do that if he didn’t let go of my arm.

“I’m not doing anything here! I didn’t even mean to run into you!”

“Right, like you didn’t mean to practically break my foot in the grocery store two years ago?”

“Your foot was fine,” I snapped.

“I had to have my big toe splinted against my other one,” he argued. “I had a limp for weeks!”

“You grew out of it,” I said.

“It’s a pretty inconvenient thing to break, you know,” he snapped at me. “It turns out that your feet are pretty fucking important.”

“You would know, you’re the fucking football player,” I growled back at him. My face was flush with anger now and I wasn’t feeling all that calm. He’d practically ambushed me in a Wal-Mart of all places when I’d been cramping and emotional and now he had the audacity to be angry with me over that. Granted, he didn’t know about the ice cream and the wine and he couldn’t possibly know about the cramps and the heartbreak, but it wasn’t like I meant to break his goddamn toe. Who even knew that toes were so easy to break!

“I’m not in college anymore, Clarke. I don’t play football,” he snapped.

“No, I guess your new hobby is homicide,” I snarled at him. Good going, Clarke. Rile up the potential murderer and see how far that gets you.

It was a low blow, which I knew, but I also wasn’t really in the mood to apologize for it. He was the one who started the bickering, and if this was going to end it, all the better for me. I clearly didn’t have anything to prove to him.

“So that’s it then?” He asked me viciously. “You read the paper and thought you’d get your rocks off and come fuck my life up just a little bit more?”

“I couldn’t care less about your fucked up life, Bellamy,” I shouted. “I came here—”

“To find Reese fucking Lemkin,” he interrupted me.

“No, actually!” I shouted at him and took a deep breath before I spoke again. “I’m working for John Murphy as a bail bonds agent. You’re in violation of your agreement.”

“Oh, that’s rich,” he said before a bark of laughter escaped his chest. “Murphy sent you to come and apprehend me? Oh, that’s just great.” He wore a real genuine smile and it only made my blood boil more.

“Is that supposed to be funny?” I snarled.

“You tell me, Princess,” he said and he let the door swing open before retreating into the room. I followed in after him because my judgment is broken. “I mean, look at you. You really think that Murphy or anyone else thinks you're gonna be able to bring me in?”

“I’m a fully capable woman,” I snapped at him. He shrugged a black windbreaker on over his t-shirt and turned to me, looking me up and down.

“Oh I know just how capable you are,” he said, his voice low and gravelly.

Fury sparked inside of me. He didn’t get to talk to me like that, not after everything that hadn’t happened between us. I’d given him my goddamn number, like an idiot, and thought I might get at least a text. And then Raven had sent him a friend request on facebook from my account that he’d never responded to. It was probably still pending, but I’d long since stopped checking that thing. He didn’t get to remember how capable I was or wasn’t, or pretend like he knew anything about me anymore.

What an ass.

“Listen, Blake,” I said in an attempt to sound more confident than I actually was “I might not know a whole lot about this bond apprehension stuff, but I’m stubborn and I’m relentless and the money I’d get for bringing you in wouldn’t be too bad either. You can make this difficult or we can just get this over with right now and make it easier on both of us.”

He grinned at me. He actually grinned at me. “God, I forgot how funny you were,” he said. “Which is great since I haven’t had much to laugh about lately.”

What the fuck was he talking about? He’d never known if I was funny or not in the first place. We barely knew each other before we’d slept together and we hadn’t talked after. He didn’t know me and I wasn’t really in the mood to play along with the idea that he did.

“Do I look like I’m joking?”

“No, which is what makes this funnier,” he chuckled before he pushed passed me, the duffel bag that Miller had brought him over his shoulder, and walked out of the room onto the concrete pathway outside. He gave me an expectant look when he saw me still standing inside. “This has been fun and all, but I gotta get going, so I’m gonna need you to go back to doing whatever it was you were doing before you came here to harass me.”

“I’m not here to harass you. I’m here to apprehend you,” I told him and followed him out of the room. He locked the door behind us and started marching across the parking lot. “Where are you going?” I called after him.

“Wouldn’t you like to know,” he said before stopping in front of a late-model car parked near his room. He unlocked it and tossed the bag onto the passenger’s seat before sliding himself halfway in. For the first time since I barge onto his doorstep, he took a long, appreciative look at me and I hated him for it. Despite the fact that he looked like he’d been sleeping on couches and living off fast food, he was still hot as hell.

“I like it when you let your hair down like that,” he said after a while of staring. “Reminds me of what it looks like when you let loose a bit.”

“You don’t get to say stuff like that about me,” I told him firmly, trying to ignore the flutter in my chest. The flutter was accompanied by a painful ache. Part of me had been able to delude myself into thinking he just didn’t remember who I was, and that’s why he hadn’t phoned or cared. Of course, he did remember. He knew exactly who I was and exactly what we’d done, and it still didn’t matter to him.

“I guess not,” he said with a shrug. “Can’t help myself around you though.”

“Is that supposed to excuse your behavior?” I asked him, pretending like I was just talking about the shameless flirting and not the fact that I’d lost my virginity to him.

“Absolutely not,” he said, a little more intensely than I was expecting. “I probably deserved more than a broken toe back then, you know.”

“You think?” I scoffed, crossing my arms over my chest and glaring at him.

“Too bad you’re too soft to do anything about it,” he said with a smirk before closing the door of the car. He pulled out of the parking lot and left me in the dust, my mouth hanging open wide enough to catch flies.

 

* * *

 

I barreled into Murphy’s office just angry enough to tip Emori off. She gave me a once over before passing my a mug of coffee.

“Did you get a lead on Blake?” She asked me innocently enough.

“I think I’m in over my head with this Emori,” I admitted. “Like, the guy’s a cop and a murderer and I don’t know the first thing about catching criminals, let alone criminals who specialize in capturing criminals.”

“Take a breath, babe,” she advised me. “As it turns out, I’ve got a vested interest in making sure you pull this thing off, so I’m gonna help you.”

“You’re gonna show me how to do this damn job?” I asked, trying and failing to not sound too hopeful.

“God no,” she chuckled. “I’m not patient enough to try to show you the ropes, but I might know someone who is.”

“Who’s that?”

“They call him the Ice King,” she said. “Or at least, people do sometimes, but his name is Roan Kingsley.”

“The Ice King? Are you serious?” I scoffed. “I don’t mean to be rude, Emori, but something about that nickname doesn’t scream badass, you know? I’ll take my chances with Blake on my own.”

“Yeah no. That’s not gonna happen,” Emori told her.

“I’m telling you, thanks but no thanks,” I said slowly.

“And I’m telling you, my interest in you getting this done just peaked,” Emori snapped. “In other words, John and I put money down on this, and I’m a sore loser, Griffin, so you might as well take my advice.”

“You bet on me against Murphy?” I asked with a sly smile.

“Only because John was being a smug bastard,” she told me sternly. “Not because I actually think you have any skills. You’re going to crash and burn if you don’t get Roan’s help with this.”

“Okay, fine, who the fuck is this Roan guy?” I asked.

“I actually don’t know much about him except that he was Special Forces before he worked for Murphy. Takes on all the big cases and never lets a perp slip through his fingers. Can’t say his methods are always kosher if you know what I mean, but he gets the job down quick, clean and quiet.”

“I don’t know what you mean,” I told her.

“The guy is creative, that’s all,” she said, and when she noticed my blank expression, she further elaborated. “He’s been known to bend the rules from time to time, but nobody gives a shit because he brings in the bad guys. If anyone can help you get this done, Roan’s the guy.”

“How do I get in touch with him?”

An hour later, I was sitting next to Roan Kingsley in a cafe downtown with a latte sitting between us.

“You sure you don’t want anything other than water?” I asked him for probably the tenth time.

He hadn’t said much since he arrived and the silence was uncomfortable. His long, sandy blonde hair was pulled half up into a bun and his beard was trimmed neatly near his face. He had piercing blue eyes and an earring that dangled down from his right ear. It might have looked silly if the man wasn’t an absolute tank, as it were though, he looked like a bodybuilder on steroids. His arms bulged out of the tight fitting t-shirt he was wearing and he towered over me. I pegged him at probably six feet tall, but he could easily be taller; I was a bad judge of height since nearly everyone was taller than me.

He raised an eyebrow at me and smirked. “You sure you wanna be here?”

“Do you?” I challenged him.

He leaned back in his chair, rocking two of the legs up off the ground. “So Emori tells me you’re Murphy’s newest bond agent. Interesting choice.”

“Did she mention the part where you’re supposed to make sure it doesn’t seem like an interesting choice anymore?” I asked.

“She might have said something about that,” he mused. “I didn’t tell her I would though. I don’t like to make promises I can’t keep.”

“So you had me come to meet you here during the middle of the day for no reason then?” I asked with a dry chuckle. “Great. Awesome. Cool.”

“Don’t get your panties all twisted,” he said. “Just trying to get a feel for you.”

“Just ask me what you want to know,” I said. “No need to skirt around anything. I’m an open book.” Kind of. I was a half-open book, but I could usually supply responses even to questions I didn’t want to answer.

“She said something about needing to turn you into the belle of bail bond apprehension,” he said.

“Those were her words?”

“Maybe not verbatim, but that’s the gist, right?”

“More or less,” I said, adding, “I basically just need to get good at this fast. At the very least, I need to be better than mediocre at this fast, and right now I’m sitting at awful.”

“What’s the rush?”

“Can’t a girl just want to be decent at her new job?” I asked.

“What made you want this to be your new job?”

“Money’s good. Hours are flexible.”

“You sure those are your only reasons?” He asked, an eyebrow quirked up. “Bond enforcement is a pretty dangerous business. You better have something better than needing money.”

I didn’t really. I needed the money and I wasn’t super interested in anything else. Besides, there was no way in hell I was giving up after that run in with Bellamy.

“I’ve got some personal reasons, but that’s none of your business,” I snapped.

“Those personal reasons better be pretty fucking good.”

They weren’t, but whatever.

“What are your reasons?” I asked.

He looked at me and his eyes narrowed for a fraction of a second. “None of your business,” he mimicked back to me with a twitch of a smile. “Long and short of it is that I’m good at this kind of thing. You do what you’re good at.”

“Unless you’re me” I quipped, hoping to earn a smile from him.

“Yeah I guess so,” he chuckled. “I guess I’ll see what I can do about that.”

“So you’ll help me?” I asked him.

“Did Murphy give you a skip?” He asked without answering my question.

“Bellamy Blake.”

Roan let out a low whistle and tilted his back before releasing a booming laugh. It bounced around the walls of the cafe and people shot us a few dirty looks. When he calmed down enough to look at me, his mouth fell open for a second. “You were serious about that?”

“Why do people keep laughing at this?” I snapped. “Yes, I’m serious. I’m going after Bellamy Blake.”

“Oh, Sweetheart, you’re not getting that guy. No way in hell,” he told me with an amused expression. “You’re talking about bringing in a dude who catches criminals for a living. This isn’t some wifebeater who took off into the night. This guy’s good.”

“Emori told me you were the best,” I shot back at him. “Told me you knew how to be creative.”

“I don’t think yours and my version of creative are quite the same thing.”

“Well, I don’t have to be creative in the same way as you,” I sighed. “I just need to grab Blake and make a quick buck. I’m not looking to make a fool of myself any more than I already have and Emori told me you’d be able to help me with that, so are you in or out?”

“Oh, I’m in,” Roan said. “I wouldn’t miss this train wreck for the world.”

“Thanks for that,” I grumbled.

“I mean it affectionately.”

“You don’t know me well enough to mean it affectionately.”

“Touche,” he said before taking a sip of his ice water. After a beat, he was all back to business.

“So what have you got so far? You done any research on this guy? Been to his place? Talk to the family?”

“Well…” I wasn’t exactly looking forward to explaining the disaster of earlier this morning to  
Roan. He already thought I was an incompetent fool, which I guess meant that he couldn’t think any less of me. “I ran into his sister at his house and then lucked into finding him at some beat up motel.”

“And?”

“And he left,” I said.

“You do realize that the point of this job is to catch the guy, right?” Roan asked me with a smirk and I shot him a withering glare.

“Thanks for that asshole,” I snapped. “Yeah, I get it. I fucked up this morning, which is why you’re sitting across from me now.”

“How’d he get away?”

“He got in his car and drove away,” I said.

He chuckled at that. “Did you grab the plates?”

I slapped my palm on my forehead and ran it up into my hair. “Jesus, I’m an idiot,” I exclaimed. For someone who watched as much crime TV as I did, you’d think I’d have some common sense.

“Probably wouldn’t have led to anything if it makes you feel better,” Roan said with a shrug. “Guys like Blake aren’t stupid enough to get caught in a stolen vehicle. He’s likely already dumped it and found another.”

“That doesn’t make me feel any better.”

“That’s not on me, Sweetheart,” he said. I gritted my teeth at the nickname but didn’t lash out about it. I needed this guy firmly on my side. “Don’t suppose you’ve got yourself equipped with a gun?”

“You think I should get one?”

“I think you’re trying to bring in a guy who shot a bullet at point blank range through another guy’s head,” Roan told me. “The guy Bellamy offed was named Eric Lovejoy. From what I read, he painted Lovejoy’s brains across the back wall.”

“That’s a great picture you just put into my mind there,” I said, feeling a little nauseous.

“Thought you might want to know what you’re getting yourself into,” Roan said.

“I might not have needed quite that much detail,” I said.

“How much more do you know about the case?”

“Only what I read in the file Emori gave me,” I said. “Blake was off-duty when it happened around a month ago. According to his statement, he was responding to a call late at night from a girl named Maya Vie. She called his personal number and he showed up at her apartment without calling it into the police station. Witnesses say they heard three gunshots, but there’s only evidence of the one Blake shot through Lovejoy’s head. Blake says Maya wasn’t there when he got to the apartment. The door was open and when he went in to check on her, Lovejoy jumped him and tried to take him out. Says the shot he took was self-defense.”

“Her neighbors told police that Maya had been there all night though,” I continued to explain. “But no one’s seen her since Blake was arrested. He didn’t resist arrest and he was pretty open during the initial investigation, but there’s nothing to corroborate his story. Charges were pressed against him two weeks after the shooting.”

“Did you get anything out of him when you saw him?”

“We didn’t exactly talk about the murder when I ran into him earlier,” I said.

“Does the name Paxton McCreary mean anything to you?” Roan asked. “Or Dante Wallace?”

“Wallace basically owns Seattle,” I said. “Everyone knows who Dante Wallace.”

“What about McCreary?”

“McCreary...It sounds familiar.”

“That’s because he’s Wallace’s right hand,” Roan explained. “Sticks to the guy like glue.”

“What does this have to do with Blake?” I asked.

“Dante Wallace has a string of guys on his payroll. McCreary’s his main man, but Lovejoy was pretty high up there too. If Blake’s mixed up with them, there’s probably a good reason.”

“You’re saying you believe him?”

“I’m saying that these guys are bad dudes, and Blake’s not a dirty cop. If he shot Lovejoy, then Lovejoy probably gave him a pretty damn good reason.”

“Even good cops make mistakes,” I said.

“Not like this, Sweetheart. Not Blake.”

“What makes you so sure?”

“The point I’m trying to make here is that something’s off. There are dirty cops and bad cops and neither of those descriptions fit Blake.”

“Why does it matter?”

“Going after Blake means getting involved in all this,” Roan told. “I’m telling you so that you’re not going into this blind. You’ll need to be careful if you still want to do this.”

“You think I’ve changed my mind,” I said. It wasn’t a question. I could tell by the way he was leading the conversation that this was what he was expecting.

“I’m telling you that it wouldn’t be unreasonable if you did.”

A sudden sick feeling started to pool in the base of my stomach. Bellamy was mixed up in some shady shit. I’d read about the murder, I knew the details, but I hadn’t really stopped to consider what all of that meant. And if I did end up catching him, he’d likely be serving a life sentence in prison. The man wasn’t exactly my favorite person, but even I didn’t think he deserved to die in prison.

“You still want in?” Roan asked.

“If I don’t, someone else will, right?” I asked. I wasn’t stupid. I knew how these things worked. Well, I kind of knew how these things worked.

“That’s the way the game works, babe,” he told me. “It’s not your place to decide whether someone is guilty. The fact that he skipped on bail is a completely separate issue from his murder charge.”

“It’s not completely separate,” I said quietly.

“Maybe not, but a job’s a job,” Roan said. “If you want it, you got my help. If not, someone else is going to pick him up eventually.”

“Why not just go after him yourself?” I asked. “If you’re so good, why weren’t you on this from that start?”

“Murphy’s got his reasons.”

“And what about your reasons?”

“I don’t got any,” he said with a shrug. “Blake seems like a decent dude, and I’ll make that money bringing in someone else. Nothing more to it.”

“Is there anything more about Blake I should know?”

“You tell me,” Roan said with a smirk, and for a split second, I thought Murphy had let something about my past with Blake slip. Roan didn’t say anything further though, so it dropped between us. “There is something else though.”

“What’s that?”

“Rumour has it your boy Blake isn’t just wanted by the police,” Roan said.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

Roan held up his index finger and thumb into the shape of a gun, and my mouth dropped open.

“There’s a hit out on Bellamy?”

“I’m just passing along what I heard in the street,” he said. “I told you, he’s pissed off some bad dudes and they don’t really take too kindly to that sort of thing.”

“I bet,” I said, feeling sicker by the minute. There was a real chance that someone was going to get to Bellamy before me, and that someone was going to do a whole lot worse than what I was planning.

“You still sure?”

“Do you think I should bail?”

“I think that you should be careful,” Roan said slowly. “And I think that throwing yourself into this when you’re not prepared is the opposite of that.”

“You’re helping me prepare though.”

“Not in the way the other guys are prepared,” Roan said. He meant that the other guys were killers. They were prepared to kill and I wasn’t. Maybe that’s what Roan meant when he said we were creative in different ways. I wondered if he was prepared to kill when working a job.

“Do you think I can do it if I’m prepared?”

“No.”

I didn’t get the vibe that he was saying it to be mean. He probably genuinely believed I wasn’t capable of bringing in Bellamy Blake, but he didn’t know just how far stubbornness ran through my veins. Bellamy Blake had managed to avoid me for long enough.

“Will you help me?”

“I already told you that I didn’t want to miss the show,” Roan said and grinned at me.

“Alright, so where do we start?”

 

* * *

 

It was dark out when I got back to my apartment that night. Roan hadn’t been kidding when he said he wanted to help me out, but it hadn’t exactly been cheap. My plans to pick up groceries on the way home had been shot to shit after we’d finished getting me equipped. Who knew that a gun and a set of handcuffs was so expensive?

When my phone blared out, I nearly dropped the heavy purse I’d had to buy to accommodate my new gear. Raven’s name flashed across the screen.

“Where the hell have you been?” She demanded after I greeted her.

“What do you mean?” I asked innocently.

“I mean, I dropped by Murphy’s office to see if you’d gotten the job and some chick with a crazy face tattoo greeted me at the front desk instead of you,” Raven said. “And then when I went to your apartment to check in on you because I thought you’d be pissed that Murphy didn’t hire you, but you weren’t there.”

“I’ve been out.”

“That’s just it,” Raven said. “You don’t go out, Griffin. I know you didn’t have a shift at the domestic violence center, so what gives? What have you been up to?”

“Murphy didn’t have a receptionist job open when I went in there,” I told her.

“Yeah, I got that much figured out.”

“Well if you know everything then I guess I don’t really need to tell you,” I said, feeling somewhat petty.

“Okay, okay, point made.”

“Thank you,” I said before continuing. “So I couldn’t get a job as a receptionist, but that’s not what he was hiring for in the first place.”

“Jesus Clarke, this isn’t going where I think it is, is it?”

“Just hear me out, okay!” I insisted “The money is better than anything else I could be doing right now, and the hours are flexible, so I don’t have to be working in an office all day.”

“When I said get a job so that you didn’t have to be making money in sketchy ways, I didn’t mean that you should become a fucking bounty hunter! That’s the opposite of what I told you to do.”

“You told me that I should find a way to make money that didn’t involve Finn Collins,” I said pointedly. “This doesn’t involve Finn Collins.”

“You’re chasing after criminals!” Raven exclaimed.

“Technically, since they failed to appear in court, none of the people I’m after are convicted criminals.”

“Failing to appear is a crime! Whether or not they’re proven guilty of their other crimes doesn’t negate that.”

“I feel like that’s just semantics,” I said.

I could her exasperation through the phone. If I knew Raven as well as I think I did, she was holding the phone away from her ear right now and trying to take deep breaths. I could hear the soft in and out of her breath.

“It’s not that bad,” I said into the phone, unsure if she was listening to me anymore.

“Like fuck Clarke, can’t you just go into debt like the rest of us? You’ll make it all back when you’re a fancy heart surgeon or whatever!”

“You’re the one who pointed me in Murphy’s direction!”

“To be a goddamn receptionist!” She shouted at me.

To be fair to Raven, I knew I was being a brat about this. Every rational thought in my head was telling me that this was a giant mistake. I was unqualified, inexperienced and generally clumsy which didn’t seem like an asset in bond enforcement. Even with Roan’s help, I wasn’t magically going to become stronger than Bellamy Blake overnight. And there was the matter of the people he was involved with. Something told me that they wanted to be the ones to find him.

Something about it seemed exciting though. Sure, there were murders and generally bad dudes involved, but chasing after criminals and catching the bad guy seemed like a good thing. Of course, Blake wasn’t necessarily a bad guy, but that was the point of a trial, right? I was just supposed to make sure he showed up to his.

“I know you’re freaking about this a little bit, which is fair,” I said. “But I’m doing this. I want to do this.”

“I know you want to do it,” Raven groaned. “But I don’t think you’re thinking this through. What if something happens to you? What are you going to do if you get shot or something?”

“I bought a gun,” I said flippantly. I probably should have thought that comment through.

“Clarke, you’re going to be a fucking doctor! You can’t just own a gun.”

“It’s not like I’m planning on using it!” I exclaimed. “It’s for protection. Roan said it was a good idea to have it.”

“Who the fuck is Roan?” Raven yelled. “Are you even listening to yourself right now?”

“In junior year you sold test answers for your thermodynamics final! You could have gotten both of us expelled for that, but I stuck by you because I knew you needed the money!” I reminded Raven. “This isn’t so different from that.”

“I wasn’t putting my life in danger,” Raven argued.

“And I won’t be either,” I told her, though it was a half-truth. I hadn’t put my life in danger yet, but it wasn’t like a bought a gun to have a fun accessory. “It’s just a temporary cash inflow. There’s nothing for you to worry about.”

“You better make sure you keep your word on that, Griffin,” Raven growled into the phone. “I’m not interested in attending your funeral.”

“Why are you always so dramatic?” I asked, chuckling into the receiver.

“Because you’ve made it your mission to make my life a living hell.”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Comments and kudos are always appreciated!


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> New chapter, yay! I hope you guys enjoy this one. The plot is starting to thicken and all that. Hopefully next chapter will be up on Thursday because my exams will be finished, but I might have a mental break down before then so who knows?

* * *

Pier 55 was always relatively busy, no matter the time of day, but it was moderately tolerable on a Tuesday morning. This time of year didn’t draw in quite as many tourists as the summer months since the air still had a chill to it. As much as I pretended to hate the tacky tourist attractions that adorned the Seattle’s waterfront, I couldn’t deny that there was a bit of charm to the fisherman style buildings that lined the water, and there was always something calming about watching the cruise ships and ferries shuttle back and forth. It wouldn’t be my first choice for a walk, but it was close to the law firm where my friend Wells Jaha worked, so I found myself there a few times every month. Eating lunch at the pier beat sitting in his stuffy glass office in sight of his stuck-up colleagues.

Wells and I had grown up together. He was the only thing I had left from my old life, and he was the only person in this city who knew anything about my family. He hadn’t lived in Seattle for very long having moved from Cambridge after his graduation from Harvard Law. When he’d shown up at my door less than a year ago proclaiming that he was moving here and there was nothing I could do about it, I couldn’t really argue with him. I didn’t really want to argue with him either. Despite the fact that I thought his move out here was rash and was going to get him into hot water with his senator father, I missed my childhood best friend. Besides, I wasn’t really an authority on rash decisions. I was the one who moved to Seattle in the first place.

“You realize that you’re the only person who lives in this city who actually likes spending time here,” I snarked at him while we walked down the slats of slimey wood.

“What are you talking about?” He exclaimed. “This place is gorgeous. What’s the point of living in this city if you’re not even going to enjoy the view?”

“I enjoy the view just fine,” I told him. “I just don’t want to do it surrounded by commercialism and tourists.”

“You sound like a local,” he groaned. “Why does everything have to be about corporate commercialism and capitalism? Can’t we just enjoy the fact that this place looks cute and leave it at that?”

“You moved to the Pacific Northwest, Wells,” I reminded him. “If you wanted corporate complacency, you probably should have moved back to Manhattan.”

“Trust me, Seattle has its fair share of corporate corruption,” Wells argued. “People around here like to act like they’re superior to all the shadiness on the East Coast, but it’s just as bad here.”

“I believe you,” I told him earnestly, thinking about Dante Wallace. Roan hadn’t outright told me that the man was doing something illegal, but the implication was that Bellamy had stumbled onto something that wasn’t right.

“I like it here though,” Wells assured me. “I’m just not as delusional as people from here. My eyes are wide open.”

“Well then maybe you can help me with something I’m working on,” I suggested. “Since you know the city’s seedy underbelly so well.” I smirked at him a bit.

“Don’t be mean” he grumbled.

“I’m just teasing,” I reassured him. “I’m looking into one of your firm’s clients actually.”

Wells pinched his eyebrows together and gave me a weird look. “Why?” He asked me slowly, drawing out the word in a long, skeptical question.

“I’m helping a friend from college out,” I told him. It wasn’t that I wanted to lie to Wells, but of all the friends I had, he was the most protective of me. If Raven’s reaction was anything to go by, I knew he wasn’t going to take my new job very well. I couldn’t risk him not telling me anything and I also wanted to skip the lecture. “I went to school with Bellamy Blake and he’s kind of got himself mixed up in some stuff concerning this guy Dante Wallace.”

He narrowed his eyes at me. “You’ve never mentioned Detective Blake before.”

“Detective Blake?” I asked him, shooting him an incredulous look. “What’s with the formality?”

“That’s how they talk about him in the papers,” Wells said, shrugging.

“No, that’s not it,” I said. “Come on, Wells, just tell me the truth.”

“I shouldn’t discuss firm business with you, Clarke,” Wells said. “You know that.”

“Just give me the coles notes version,” I suggested.

“Why do you care so much?”

“Something just seems off about the whole thing,” I told him. “Blake doesn’t strike me as a bad cop.”

“You didn’t care before,” Wells reminded me. He had me there. Before this week, I hadn’t looked twice at the headlines with Bellamy’s name in them. “What’s different now?”

“I didn’t think he was actually going to go down for it,” I lied. “Now, I’m not so sure. I’m just curious and figured you might know something since Dante’s a client at your firm.”

“You don’t want to get involved with any of this,” Wells said cryptically. “I’m not apart of Wallace’s legal team, but the man is shady as hell.”

“Shady how?”

Wells took a quick look around as and pulled me to the side away from the few other people milling around the pier. “Shady as in, you shouldn’t be asking questions about him,” he said, his voice lowered. “And you definitely shouldn’t be asking questions about Detective Blake. Just let it go, Clarke.”

“Do you think Blake’s innocent?”

“It doesn’t matter what I think,” Wells said. “And it doesn’t matter what you think either. Guys like Dante Wallace get what they want and he wants Bellamy Blake behind bars.”

“Why does Wallace care so much? I mean, it sounds like his guy Lovejoy was causing trouble.”

“Clarke,” Wells said sharply.

“Just answer a few of my questions and I’ll let it go,” I promised. “Call it a casual curiosity.”

He sighed. “You promise that that’s all this is about? You’re not getting any stupid ideas?”

“When have I ever had a stupid idea?” I asked him with a smirk.

The look in his eyes suggested that he had a list at the ready.

“You promise to keep this to yourself?”

“Should I sign my first born child over to you while we’re at it?” I quipped before smiling at him softly. “Seriously, Wells, relax. I cross-my-heart-and-hope-to-die, anything you say stays between us. Always.”

“Okay, fine,” Wells sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose. “You already know that Dante Wallace owns half of Seattle. He’s a business investor, but from what I understand, his investments seem too good to be true.”

“You think he’s cleaning money?” I asked. A feeling of dread settled in my stomach.

“He’s made a habit of investing in floundering businesses that would otherwise be declaring bankruptcy. Once Wallace slaps his name on the door, they manage to keep their head above water,” Wells said. “There’s a pattern there. It wouldn’t be hard for a cop to pick up on it.”

“You think that’s what Bellamy was investigating before he shot Lovejoy?”

“If I were looking into Wallace, that’s where I would start.”

I kept the irony of that statement to myself. Wells wouldn’t know where or how money was being laundering if it was happening right under his nose. It had been happening right under his nose and he’d never thought twice about it, but that didn't matter anymore. I'd moved past that and Wells had no idea. He was too innocent for his own good, and I had no problem letting him stay that way.

“Have you ever heard of someone named Maya Vie?” I asked, shaking myself out of my thoughts.

“Maya works for the firm,” he said, his shoulders deflating a bit. “Or she did. No one’s seen here since all this Lovejoy stuff went down. She’s a paralegal.”

“Okay, so let me get this straight. Bellamy Blake gets a call from a paralegal from your firm—a firm that just so happens to have Dante Wallace as its biggest client. He goes to check on her because, presumably, she sounded distressed in the call. When he gets there, Maya’s nowhere to be found, but one of Wallace’s goons is and jumps Blake. In self-defense, Blake shoots the guy and somehow ends up getting charged with first-degree murder. Did I miss anything?”

“Don’t read too much into this, Clarke,” Wells said desperately. “I know you think something’s fishy here—”

“You said it yourself! Wallace is shady,” I reminded Wells. “And this sounds like a full-blown conspiracy.”

“Detective Blake’s story doesn’t add up. Witnesses heard three shots, but Blake claimed he only shot at Lovejoy once. Plus, he says that Maya wasn’t there, but neighbors saw her there that night. When the police got there, Blake was standing over Lovejoy’s warm body, with the gun in his hand. Lovejoy was unarmed. They had no choice but to press charges, Clarke. ”

“Something’s off about this, Wells,” I insisted. “You know it and I know it. I’ve got a bad feeling about it. There’s more to this than just a dirty cop snapping.”

“Maybe,” Wells agreed. “But it’s not your job to prove it. Leave it to the authorities, Clarke. This doesn’t concern you.”

“It sounds like Dante Wallace has the authorities in his pocket,” I argued. “If it’s left to them, Blake’s going down for this.”

“You promised me you wouldn’t do anything stupid if I told you what I know,” Wells reminded me. “And it sounds like you’re planning to look into this more and I’m telling you right not, that would be an incredibly stupid idea. You don’t even really know this guy. Let it go.”

“I don’t know if I can!”

“I knew I shouldn’t have said anything,” Wells groaned. “It could all just be one really big coincidence, Clarke. Blake gets a call from Maya, but that doesn’t mean he was looking into Wallace. Maybe Maya was dating Lovejoy, Blake got involved with her and shot her boyfriend because he was jealous.”

“No, Bellamy wouldn’t do that—”

“You don’t know what he would do! Clarke, you don’t know these people. You don’t know what happened. This isn’t something you should be sticking your nose in. Don’t let your emotions cloud your judgment.”

“That’s not what this is,” I snapped.

“Then what is it?”

“I told you, he's a friend from college.”

“I know all your friends from college,” Wells reminded me. “Detective Bellamy Blake isn’t one of them.”

I never did tell Wells about what happened with Bellamy. At the time, we’d been distant, by location and for other reasons. He was finishing off his undergrad degree in Cambridge and I’d just moved to Seattle. Telling Raven had been hard enough, and Wells and I weren’t really the kind of friends who shared intimate details about our sex lives. Considering we were practically brother and sister, we both mutually and wordlessly decided neither of us wanted to share that part of our lives. Wells had no reason to believe that I was interested in this Bellamy Blake business beyond an unhealthy curiosity, and if I hadn’t already been convinced that he didn’t need to know about the whole bail bond agent thing, I definitely wouldn’t be telling him now. He needed to think that I was letting this go.

I probably should have been letting this go.

“Okay, fine!” I exclaimed. “I’m letting this drop, but it’s still going to bug me.”

“I would expect nothing less,” Wells said. “This is for the best though, Clarke. I hope you get that.”

I rolled my eyes internally but smiled at my best friend. He really did mean well. “Yeah, I do,” I lied. “I guess I just got caught up in it.”

We walked a bit further down the pier before turning around and heading back. Wells only had an hour for lunch and needed to head back to the office. As a junior associate, the fact that he’d even taken a lunch at all was probably going to put him behind for the day.

“I’ll walk you back,” I offered, linking my arm with his. “You can talk my ear off about your girlfriend on our way back.”

“You don’t have to,” Wells told me. “I can see where you parked from here. It’ll be a waste of time to have to walk back.”

“I’m never wasting time when I’m hanging out with you,” I said, laying it on a little bit thick. I loved spending times with Wells, I just wasn’t usually a mushy-feelings type of gal.

“Are you sure you’re feeling good?” He asked me with a chuckle.

I rolled my eyes and dragged him towards the crosswalk. Together, we started heading up Marion Street towards the series of tall, glass office buildings that lined the streets of downtown Seattle. The firm Wells worked for was a massive law conglomerate and the building where he worked housed other corporate monoliths of the likes of Walt Disney. It would all be very intimidating if I didn’t know Wells, but I was used to following him through the automatic doors and past the security guard.

“You really don’t need to walk me to my cubicle, Clarke,” he told me as I followed him into the elevator.

“I’m being chivalrous,” I joked. “I want to make sure you get back to your desk in one piece.”

“You’re up to something,” he said.

“I’m just waiting for the right time to push my agenda on you,” I explained. “I want to meet this Luna girl you’re obsessed with and you’re not taking the bait.”

“Is that why you wanted me to talk about her on the way back?” He groaned.

“Yes, you block of wood,” I said. “You’ve been dating her for like two months and I haven’t met her yet. That’s weird, man.”

“What’s weird is how pushy you are about this,” Wells murmured. We’d made it to his tiny cubicle, which was my queue to leave. I’d had my fun and I didn’t want to get Wells in any trouble with his colleagues. If I knew anything about the guys who he worked with, it was that they were all tools who took any excuse to rib the hell out of one another.

“I’ll talk to you later!” I called back to him as I exited the associates' room. Instead of heading straight towards the elevators, I took a detour down one of the hallways. The only place I’d actually been to at Wells’ firm had been his desk, so I was shooting blind. After wandering around for a bit, I ran into a smartly dressed woman who deftly managed to avoid dumping the contents of her coffee cup on her blouse.

“You might want to watch where you’re going,” she snapped.

“I’m so sorry,” I said quickly. “I’m just waiting for a meeting with someone and got lost trying to find their office.”

“Didn’t the receptionist direct you?” She asked, her eyes narrowed.

“I’ve been here before and thought I’d remember where I was going,” I explained. I didn’t want to get the poor receptionist in trouble because I was meddling.

She sighed heavily and gave me a cool look. “I’ll show you where you need to go. Who did you say you were meeting again?”

“This is really embarrassing,” I said, trying my best to sound flustered. “I was looking for a friend and thought I would be able to find their office.”

“If you’re friend works here, why didn’t you just ask for them at the front. They could have met you at the front.”

“I was hoping for it to be a surprise.”

“What did you say your name was again?” The woman asked me. If her expression was anything to go by, I wasn’t really playing off my lie very well. She looked somewhere past skeptical, but not quite at disbelieving.

“Callie Cartwig,” I gave her the fake name, hoping it wasn’t as obvious as the name I’d given to Bellamy.

“You said that a friend of yours works here. Who might that be?”

Shit. I hadn’t thought about that. This whole thing had been spur of the moment. My original plan had been to find the break room and try to shoot the shit with some of the lawyers and maybe ask a couple of questions about Wallace.

“My friend Maya Vie,” I said, hoping it wasn’t too revealing. “I haven’t seen her in a while and was hoping to get her to go to lunch with me.”

“I’m guessing you haven’t read the news lately,” the woman said.

“I’m a new mom,” I lied to her. “I haven’t got much time for newspapers and all that.”

“Of course,” she said cooly, leading me down the hallway towards the elevators. “I’m sorry to be the one to tell you that your friend doesn’t work here anymore.”

“Did something happen?” I asked innocently enough.

“That’s just it,” the woman said. “We haven’t heard anything from Maya in weeks. We’re all very worried about her.”

“That doesn’t sound like her.” I hoped it didn’t sound like her. I didn’t know Maya from Eden, but if she was a paralegal at a fancy law firm, she was probably pretty reliable.

“No, it really doesn’t,” the woman said. She pressed the button for the elevators. And reached her hand into her purse. When she pulled it out, she was holding a small card out towards me. “My name is Lorelei Tsing. I’m Maya’s boss.”

Taking the card from her, I looked it over quickly before glancing up at her. “I’m not really in need of a lawyer, Ms. Tsing.”

“I wasn’t giving this to you to offer my services,” she explained. “We’re all very worried about Maya. If you’re friends with her, you might hear from her before we do. If that happens, I’d like you to give me a call so that I can make sure Maya’s okay.”

“I’ll be sure to do that,” I told her before stepping back onto the elevator. Something about that woman gave me the heeby-jeebies. Maybe that’s just the vibe all corporate lawyers gave off, but I could tell she was a stone cold bitch. If anyone knew about what Dante Wallace was up to, it was Lorelai Tsing. The title on her card read managing partner which meant she had the whole firm under her thumb. Thank god I didn’t give her my real name.

I was still staring at the card in my hand as I walked out of the office building onto the street. The day was still young and I didn’t have a shift at the domestic violence center until later in the week. Since I didn’t have much else going on, I wanted to keep snooping around Blake, but other than looking up Dante Wallace on the internet, I didn’t really know where to start.

I didn’t expect Roan to answer when I called, so when it went to voicemail, I had the short speech already prepared in my head. I was looking down at the pavement as I spoke into the phone, not looking up until I’d tapped the red button on my screen.

When I did look up, a sleek, black Mercedes had pulled up in front of me. It wasn’t unheard of for cars like that to drive around Seattle, especially outside a top law firm, but this one wasn’t just passing by. The door closest to me opened up and a voice ordered out to me. “Get in.”

Oh, hell no.

I started backing up away from it, but after just two steps, I ran into something solid. Turning quickly, I nearly collided with a wall of a man who towered over me. His face was blank, hair cut short in a buzzcut and clothes looked like they came straight from some sort of spy clothing catalogue. It took me a second to realize that he was holding a gun towards the ground in front of him.

“Get in the car,” he told me.

Who was I to argue?

I did as I was told and slipped into the seat nearest the sidewalk in the car. Not knowing who to expect, I shouldn’t have been surprised when Cage Wallace, famed son of Dante Wallace, was sitting in the seat next to me.

“What the hell is this?” I demanded. It might not be the smartest thing to say to someone who’d just coerced you into a vehicle at gunpoint, but it wasn’t like he was holding the gun in his hand right this instance. My mind flickered to the gun that I’d started keeping in my purse. Somehow, whipping it out and pointing it at Cage Wallace didn’t seem like a good plan.

“I just wanted to talk.”

Cage was a greasy looking man who probably needed to spend more time in the sun. In his defense, the sun wasn’t exactly easy to come by in Seattle, but even by Washington State standards, he was pale. His skin was nearly translucent and his dark head of hair was too full to be natural. He had a strong brow, a pointed chin and a smile that made the skin on my skin itch.

“Talk about what,” I spat. “I don’t even know who you are.”

“I doubt that’s true,” he said with a sly smile. I wasn’t sure if he was saying it out of arrogance or because he was onto me. This little visit probably had something to do with my conversation with Tsing just moments before. It was too convenient for it not to be.

“I might know that you’re Cage Wallace, but I don’t know what you want to talk to me about,” I said.

“That’s why you got in the car.”

“No, I got in the car because your goon has a gun.”

“That was just some incentive,” Cage said. “Couldn’t have you running off. But now you’re here.”

I didn’t say anything to that. I didn’t really have anything to say. Internally, I was freaking out, but I couldn’t let Wallace see that. He was already enjoying watching me squirm too much. I couldn’t give him anything else to work with.

“I heard you were looking for Maya Vie,” he said. He’d definitely been talking to Tsing.

“I’m a friend of hers,” I told him. My eyes were scanning the streets as we passed them, but it was hard to see the signs. The rear windows were tinted to be almost opaque and a black screen separated the front seats from the back. It was unnerving to not know where we were going, and the realization that no one knew I was with Wallace didn’t go over my head. Wells thought I’d headed straight home. No one was around when I got in the car.

My heart was hammering against my ribcage and I could feel the dampness on my back. There was no escape plan here. I was pretty sure that the doors in the backseat were locked, so I couldn’t even roll out the door and get run over by the cars behind us. I was trapped with Cage Wallace sitting three feet away from me looking at me like he’d just found some long lost treasure.

“I’ve never heard her mention you before,” Cage mused. “You must not be very close.”

“Maya’s pretty private,” I lied.

“If you were friends with her, you’d know that she and I are pretty private together.”

Maya and Cage were an item? That didn’t seem right. I couldn’t imagine anyone wanting to be alone with this guy, but my judgment on him was a bit skewed given the whole kidnapping thing.

“Maya’s never mentioned you to me before,” I said. She’d never mentioned him to me because she’d never actually spoken to me. I wasn’t about to admit that to Cage though.

“I’m pretty sure you don’t know Maya,” Cage said, and my heart dropped. I’d had a feeling that he knew I was lying, but I wasn’t ready for it to be confirmed. “And I’m pretty sure your real name isn’t Callie Cartwig.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said. “That’s the name on my birth certificate.”

“That’s funny because I had the same name run through the police database and the only Callie Cartwig in their system passed away three years ago. Left her car running in the garage. Poor girl.”

The fact that there even was a Callie Cartwig in existence was more than I could have expected.

“I stole the identity, but it’s what people call me,” I told him.

Instead of asking another question, Cage ripped my purse from my hand. I fought him for control of it, landing a decent scratch across his forearm, but his strength overpowered mine, especially sitting side by side in a car. I had no leverage, nothing to get the upper hand. Now he had my purse, my wallet, and my gun.

“What’s a nice girl like you doing with a gun like this?” He pulled out the Smith & Wesson compact pistol that Roan had told me to buy. At the time, I thought it’d been a pretty expensive paperweight to have in my purse, but now I was wishing I hadn’t left it in there for Cage to get his hands on. If I’d had it on my hip in a holster or something smart like that, I wouldn’t be sitting here watching him play with it.

“I don’t use it,” I told him, hoping it might make him leave it alone. “It’s just for protection.”

He laughed at that. I probably would too if I were in his position. Some protecting the gun did; I was sitting in the back of a car with a goblin against my will. The same thing would have happened to me if I didn’t have the gun.

He continued rifling through my things, sifting past the loose tampons and packs of gum. Eventually, his hands landed on my wallet and he pulled it out between his thumb and forefinger.

“Look what we found here,” he said gleefully. I made a mash dash to get the wallet from him, but he slammed me backward with a rough push of his arm. My head hit the window behind me hard enough that a black spot clouded my vision for a couple seconds. Slowly, he opened it up, watching me as he did, and peeled out my driver’s license. I’d known that was what he was after—it wasn’t like Cage Wallace needed the five dollar bill that was crumbled up in the bottom of my wallet.

“Clarke Griffin,” he announced. “That’s a peculiar name. Won’t make it too hard to track you down. I like it.”

A sick feeling settled in my stomach. This guy knew my name and my address now. Both were clearly printed on the tiny piece of plastic clutched in his hand, and unlike Finn, he wasn’t opposed to using violence to get his way. In a very short amount of time, I’d gone from being a nobody to the Wallace family to firmly on their radar.

Wells was going to be pissed.

“Look,” I said, trying to regain some control of the situation. “My name’s Clarke Griffin and I’m a fugitive apprehension agent looking for Bellamy Blake. That’s the only reason I was digging into Maya Vie. I thought she might be able to point me towards Blake so that I can get my payday a little quicker.”

Cage’s eyes narrowed and he gave me a once over, head to toe. I didn’t exactly look the part of a bond enforcer, but the story itself was too specific to sound fake. At least that’s what I was hoping.

“You’re looking for Blake?” Cage asked.

“Uh, yeah,” I said, clearing my throat. “He skipped out on bail and the sum for his recovery is no small thing.”

The car was starting to slow down, and my heart leaped in my chest. I hadn’t looked out the window in a while. For all I knew, they could be pulling off into an abandoned field where no one was going to look for my body.

“I’m gonna give you the benefit of the doubt here, Miss Griffin,” Cage said after a long pause. The car had come to a complete stop and the instinct to run from the car was overcoming my body. I knew the doors were still locked though. Trying to run was just going to make him angrier. “As it turns out, I’m also in the business of looking for Bellamy Blake.”

“You don’t say,”

“Maybe we can strike a deal,” he suggested. “Work together?”

“I’m more of a lone wolf,” I told him.

“That wasn’t the answer I was looking for,” he said through gritted teeth. My back was pressed up against the door behind me, but Cage wasn’t backing away from me. His face was inches from mine.

“I’m not looking for a partner in this,” I said. My wavering voice gave away how scared I was.

“How about this then,” Cage said. He dipped his head past my face towards my right ear and his lips brushed against it as he spoke. If I wasn’t so damn scared, I’d have slapped him. The gun that I’d bought was still clutched in his hand while the other was placed firmly on my knee, holding me in place. “Work with me, or drop this investigation into Blake. Those are your two options.”

“And if I don’t drop it?” I asked.

“You’re not exactly a hard woman to find, Miss Griffin,” Cage chuckled. The hand on me knee reached up and behind me, and I let out a gasp of fear. Instead of hurting me, Cage wrapped his hand around the handle of the door, opened it up and pushed me out. I stumbled back onto the street, hitting the pavement hard on my back. My purse and gun flew out the door behind me.

“I’ll be in touch,” Cage called out before the car pulled away from the curb. When I looked up, I realized that he’d dropped me off in the parking lot of my apartment building. Cold fear washed over me like I’d been hit with a bucket of ice water.

 

* * *

 

 I didn’t have my car and I didn’t have a bottle of wine, and I desperately needed both things. The order in which I obtained them was probably pretty important, but I wasn’t really in a caring mood. I was scared shitless with a raging headache and I didn’t realize that I’d left my house keys in my car until I walked the entire way up to my fourth-floor apartment.

I let out a scream of frustration and my neighbor, Mr. Frei, poked his head out of his apartment.

“Everything going okay here, Clarke?” He asked me. His cat wandered out into the hall and he moved to pick her up into his arms.

“Everything is fine, Mr. Frei,” I assured him. “Left the keys to my apartment at work, so I’m locked out until I get them.”

“The super has a copy of all the keys,” he reminded me, though I’d already thought about it. It was a good idea, and really, if our super had been anyone else, I would have gone down and asked him. The guy in charge of our building was gross though and I’d dealt with enough gross guys for one day.

“Thanks, Mr. Frei,” I told my neighbor. “I’ll figure it out.”

He nodded at me before retreating into his apartment. I sighed and slid my back down against my door, resting it against it and closing my eyes. It had been a long morning and I wasn’t feeling particularly spry. All that I wanted to do was sit in my bath and drink an entire bottle of wine while I was surrounded by bubbles.

A sudden wave of emotion overcame me as the reality of what just happened crashed down. Gingerly, I brought my hand up to the spot where my head had collided with the car window. I hissed as my fingers grazed over the tender spot. The skin hadn’t broken, and I probably didn’t have a major concussion, but there was definitely going to be a bruise on my forehead. Big, fat tears welled up in my eyes, but I didn’t want to let them fall in the hallway of my building, not where anyone could stumble upon me.

I didn’t have a whole lot of options. If I phoned Raven for a ride, she’d see the bruise on my head and lose her shit. Same thing for Wells, and I couldn’t afford a cab. I hadn’t even checked my phone since Cage had dumped me from the car and driven off. When I glanced down at the screen, I noticed a missed called from Roan.

“Hey,” he greeted when I called. “Did you check out Maya’s apartment like I suggested?”

“I didn’t even listen to the message,” I admitted.

“Well I didn’t just leave it for shits and giggles,” he said. “Usually people leave messages to relay information. That’s actually the point of them.”

“Thanks for the lesson,” I snapped. “Something kind of came up.”

“What’s going on?” He asked skeptically. I’m sure my tone sounded a little hysterical.

“You weren’t my first choice to call,” I told him. “But I don’t have another option.”

“First of all, that hurt,” he said. “Second of all, tell me what’s going on.”

“Do you have time to pick me up at my apartment?” I asked. “I’ll tell you the details when you get here.”

“I’m kind of in the middle of something,” he explained. For the first time since he answered, I noticed that he was speaking in a hushed tone. It sounded like he was trying not to be noticed.

“Shit, I didn’t realize,” I said, my voice becoming embarrassingly thick. I should have realized that most people couldn’t just drop everything at one in the afternoon on a workday. I hadn’t even realized it was that early in the day until I’d checked my phone. It felt like it’d been years since I saw Wells for our early lunch. Immediately, I started racking my brain for back up plans or ways to get to my car. If all else fails, I could try picking the lock. I had a few bobby pins in my hair and the internet could be a marvelous place. I could probably find a tutorial or something.

“Text me your address,” Roan told me.

“What?” I exclaimed. “I thought you were busy.”

“Sounds like your thing is more important,” he said.

“You don’t even know what it is,” I argued.

“Are you telling me it isn’t?”

I couldn’t do that. Even though I didn’t know what Roan was up to, I really didn’t want to wait for him to finish. I was sad, tired, scared and hungry and I couldn’t imagine having to sit outside my own apartment for much longer. Plus, I needed to get my car eventually. If I ended up getting inside, but still didn’t have my car, it was going to make things difficult when I decided I wanted to leave my house. If I ever wanted to leave again, that is.

“No,” I said pathetically.

“Text me your address. I’ll be there in ten.”

My building wasn’t exactly a showstopper, but at least it didn’t look like a brothel. I lived across the street from a run-down baseball field and next to a laundromat and it was perfectly fine for my purposes. It was better than fine most of the time since the laundromat was usually empty and the cost per load was a quarter. All in all, I didn’t hate the area where I lived. I’d never felt unsafe there, at least not until today.

I waited for Roan outside the apartment complex entrance. I figured it would be easier for him to know it was the right place if he saw me right away. I suppose with built-in GPS on most cell phones now, he’d know it was right because a computer would tell him, but I was sick of moping outside my locked apartment. I’d tried to clean myself up a bit using my reflection in the door, but I’d need stronger stuff than saliva to fully remove the ring of mascara and eyeliner that had smudge itself under my eyes. My hair, however, had managed to lay flat enough that I let it stay down and half-heartedly smoothed it over the bump on my forehead. It wasn’t perfect, but I definitely didn’t look like I’d been freshly attacked. It was more of a stale-attacked-look now.

“What the hell happened to you?” Roan asked. He’d pulled up outside the building in a truck that was way too big to be good for the environment. The entire vehicle was black, from the roof racks to the tire rims, and the engine was barely audible. For a truck, it wasn’t bad, but I was personally opposed to gas guzzlers. It’s only saving grace was that it wasn’t a hummer, though Roan struck me as the type to drive one. His entire demeanor screamed overcompensation.

“Cage Wallace happened to me,” I grumbled as I slid into the passenger’s seat and slammed the door shut. “He snatched me outside my friend’s work and took me for a drive. I need you to take me to my car by Pier 55.”

“What?” Roan exclaimed, clearly unprepared for my story. I didn’t blame him. It still sounded unbelievable to my ears and I’d lived through it. “Why the hell would Cage Wallace want to talk to you of all people?”

“I might have gone around and asked some questions to some people,” I said vaguely. “But I didn’t think anything was going to come from it.”

“Jesus Christ,” he groaned through gritted teeth.

“It was an honest mistake,” I said defensively. “My friend works at the law firm that Dante Wallace does most of his business through and I thought it was a good opportunity to talk to some people. I guess I asked the wrong question.”

“Getting picked up by Cage means you probably were asking the right questions,” Roan corrected me. “Most people don’t go in and do that without some sort of backup though.”

“I didn’t really think I’d need it,” I told him. “I wasn’t even planning on asking any questions, but I ran into Lorelei Tsing and she must have tipped Cage off.”

Roan ran a hand over his face and shot me a look. “You’re lucky you’re not dead.”

“I know,” I said quietly. There was a moment in Cage’s car where I thought I was going to be dead. It wasn’t a feeling I ever wanted to experience again.

“Next time you’re planning on doing something like that, you text me or Emori at the very least,” he ordered. “You shouldn’t be doing it alone, but I’m not stupid enough to tell you to wait for someone to go with you.”

“I didn’t realize you cared,” I said, trying to lighten the mood. It didn’t.

“I don’t really want your death on my conscience,” Roan sighed.

“It wouldn’t be,” I insisted. “If Cage killed me today, that was on me. I was careless and I won’t make that mistake again.”

“You’re still going after Blake?” Roan asked, raising an eyebrow.

“I don’t like being threatened,” I said. “And I’m not scared of Cage Wallace.” Okay, that wasn’t true. I was terrified of Cage Wallace, and I knew he’d been serious when he’d given me my choices. I couldn’t let this go though. I knew too much and still knew nothing at all. Maybe before I’d talked to Wells I might have looked the other way, but I was in this now. I needed to find Blake and I needed to get answers. I’d just have to be more careful about it.

“You should be scared of him,” Roan said. We’d hit Alaskan Way and my car was parked in a lot near the pier. I pointed it out to him and he pulled off to the side. Before I could hoist myself out of the cabin, he placed a hand on my arm. “You need to be more careful,” he said sternly.

I nodded. “I will be.”

“Next time Cage Wallace takes you for a drive, he’s gonna be dropping you in a ditch, not at your apartment.”

“Thanks for the ride,” I told him and hopped out of the truck. He was right, of course, and I hadn’t even told him about the drop this or die threat that Cage had made. A normal, rational human being would take that threat and listen to it. A normal, rational human being wouldn’t have to be more careful because they wouldn’t be getting involved in the first place. Normal and rational had left my body long ago. I was in this for the long haul.

 

* * *

 

 When I finally made it back to my apartment proper, I had a bottle of wine that I’d picked up on my way and the bath was calling my name. Roan had followed me home, which meant he’d had to sit outside the liquor store while I’d debated between a box of wine or a bottle. I waved to his truck as I walked towards the door and watched as the turned out of the lot and drove away. As irritating as I found him, he was a decent guy. He certainly didn’t need to put his day on hold to bail me out of the mess that I’d just created.

The relief that washed over me as I walked through my door was overwhelming. I sniffed a bit as my nose started to run and didn’t fight the moisture that was running down my cheeks. In the comfort of my home, I let myself have a real proper breakdown on the floor of my front entrance. I didn’t make it to the bath before I had the twist-off pulled of the bottle of wine and started drinking straight from the bottle.

My apartment was a closet. What had been advertised as a one-bedroom when I’d been looking, actually turned out to be a bathroom and single room that house a kitchen, living room and bedroom all in one. It was more accurately a one-room, but it was in my budget. I didn’t mind it really. More space meant more things that needed cleaning. The tiny kitchen might bother some people, but I’d never considered myself much of a cook. The tiny space was cozy, and the shower doubled as a bath, so I couldn’t really complain.

When the tears ran out and my headache started to return, I picked myself up from the floor and started running the bath before peeling off my clothes. The water was scalding when a dipped my toes in, but I didn’t really care. My burning skin would give me something other than my shitty day to focus on.

Inevitably, Bellamy Blake and his business crept back into my mind. The whole story wreaked of conspiracy. After talking to Wells and Roan about it, I knew that something was off. And after my run-in with Cage, I knew that he was a bad dude. If Dante and Cage Wallace were washing money through Seattle small business, they’d have plenty of reason to want to keep that buried. I didn’t know much about organized crime, but people who laundered money seemed like they’d be connected to drugs. Dante Wallace wasn’t some nobody either—he was a well-respected member of the community. People sang his praises from his charity work to the community building project he’d funded, which is probably why no one ever suspects him. He’s got a good image, and you don’t come after a guy who’s beloved by his community. And from my experience, it seemed like people who did try to dig into the Wallaces were given the incentive to give up just like they’d done with me.

I wanted to piece it together because there were still parts I didn’t understand. Maya Vie was clearly a big part of this. She had ties to the Wallaces and was the only witness the night of the shooting. As a paralegal, she probably didn’t know anything too incriminating about Dante and his business, but as Cage’s girlfriend, she’d have a direct line to all the dirty secrets. Cage had insinuated they were involved, but Maya was missing now. I wondered if she’d met the same fate he threatened me with.

A cold chill ran up my spine, despite the boiling water. It wasn’t helping to focus on the Wallaces when I was trying to unwind. I was spinning my wheels; I had no new information since the last time I’d been thinking about it, and I wasn’t going to find anything else out tonight. I needed a distraction, but I only had my phone to keep me busy and I wasn't super interested in dropping it into the hot, soapy water. I thought the bath would make me feel better, but it was just giving me too much time to think.

I cleaned myself off in the bath and wrapped myself in a towel, happy to just lay face down on my bed and avoid the world for the rest of the day. It wasn’t late—a glance at the clock on my nightstand told me it was just after five in the evening—and I had no reason to be as tired as I was. I felt like I could sleep for years and was just about to test the theory when a sharp knock on my door forced me awake.

After the day I’d had, I didn’t think it counted as being paranoid to be scared of what was on the other side. For all I knew, Cage Wallace could be back or sent one of his goons to come to finish the job. Maybe he thought it wasn’t worth it to let me stick around. I hadn’t exactly been complacent when he’d told me to stop looking for Blake.

Even if it wasn’t Cage, I wasn’t feeling particularly trusting. It wasn’t like people just came around my apartment without calling ahead. I knew it wasn’t Raven or Wells, and really, there was no one else who’d stop by. The racing beat that my heart was pounding out felt fully justified.

Like any self-respecting millennial who avoided human interaction, I ignored the knock. I decided I should put some clothes on though, just in case it was someone coming to kill me. I didn’t want to die in the nude even though I figured my body probably wouldn’t be found. Dying naked felt more humiliating than dying clothed, and I had to take everything I could get.

“Clarke! Open up,” a muffled voice called along with another knock. I knew that voice, and I knew it wasn’t Cage. With an exasperated sigh, I marched over to the door and made sure to put the chain on the lock before pulling it open.

“Go away, Finn,” I snapped at Collins through the tiny opening. “I’m not in the mood to deal with you.”

“I don’t really care,” he snapped back. “We need to talk.”

“So talk,” I told him, gesturing to the gap. I wasn’t about to let him in my apartment. I’d already told him not to show up here, yet here he was.

“I’m not talking to you through a door.”

“There’s a perfectly good opening that you can talk through,” I said. “So it’s not talking through a door. There’s definitely air between us.”

“You know what I mean.”

I did. I wasn’t in the mood though, but I also didn’t want to argue with him about it. With a pointed groan of exasperation, I closed the door and removed the chain. When I swung it back open, I placed a hand on the doorframe to keep him from slipping inside.

“Aren’t you going to invite me in?” He asked, his eyes flickering to the space behind me.

“What do you want, Finn?” I asked.

He gave me a once over. Instead of lingering on my chest like normal, his eyes fell on the bruise on my forehead. I hadn’t been brave enough to see how dark it was developing. I was still praying that it wouldn’t be noticeable under some concealer.

“You’re hurt,” he said dumbly as if the dark spot on my forehead wasn’t obvious enough.

“It’s not a big deal,” I sighed. It shouldn’t be a big deal to him. Gone were the days when Finn Collins was allowed to worry about me. The fact that he was here at all was irritating enough. I wasn’t in the mood to comfort him too.

“It looks like a pretty big deal. Have you at least gotten it checked out?” He asked.

“I’m not doing this with you right now, Finn,” I said. “I’ve had a hell of a day and I just want to go to bed, so what do you want?”

He looked like he wanted to say something else about my bruise, but thankfully, he moved on. “I just wanted to check in about that letter. I thought you’d have it done by now.”

I’d completely forgotten about that damn letter. Considering everything that had happened in the past forty-eight hours, I felt pretty justified in that, but Finn probably wouldn’t feel the same. He was paying me for it after all.

“Sorry, we never discussed a deadline,” I said.

“I didn’t think we’d have to. It’s just a letter.”

“You’re right, I’ll get it to you by tomorrow,” I told him through gritted teeth. The last thing I felt like doing was putting together a document that praised Finn’s character, but I’d already agreed to it.

Instead of nodding and saying goodbye, he stood outside my door expectantly. I thought I’d been pretty clear about not inviting him in and I wasn’t interested in making small talk outside my door. If the bruise on my forehead wasn’t an indication for being a shitty mood, maybe the scowl permanently plastered across my face would be.

Finn reached out a hand towards my face and I took a step back. “Clarke,” he whispered.

“I’ll get you your reference letter tomorrow. Don’t come here anymore.” I said before slamming the door in his face. It took far too much effort to get back to my bed, but once I was there, I fell face first onto it and crashed for the night.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just thought I would send out a quick apology to anyone who is actually from Seattle if this was super inaccurate. I grew up on Vancouver Island which is just above Washington State but in Canada. I've been to Seattle, but my memory of it is not that great. I've relied heavily on google for some of this as well as my personal experience with people from the area I grew up...I assume lots of people in Seattle are West Coast hippies with a flair for the dramatic and a passion for the environment who hate corporations, but maybe that's just a Vancouver/Vancouver Island specialty. 
> 
> As always, comments and kudos are appreciated! Let me know if you're liking it!


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So I had every intention of posting this a lot earlier, but I ended up being a lot busier than I thought I would be. The first half of this chapter has been written for a while, but I struggled with the back half because I wasn't sure how I wanted to get to where I know this fic is going. 
> 
> Enough excuses. I hope you enjoy this and I hope to have the next chapter up soon. 
> 
> Also, Happy New Year! I hope 2019 brings only good things to all you lovely people reading this :)

* * *

 

 

I didn’t wake the next day until just before nine, which meant that I’d slept for longer than twelve hours. I didn’t care. Clearly, I needed the sleep.

I didn’t really have a plan for figuring out the Blake situation. As of that moment, I was still planning on bringing him in. Ten thousand dollars was a lot of money, and I couldn’t feel too bad about turning him over to the cops. The alternative for him was getting murdered. It seemed like a no-brainer.

Roan had mentioned something before I’d blindsided him with my kidnapping story. He’d thought it would be a good idea to check out Maya’s apartment, see if she was around. Considering Maya Vie was the missing link, it seemed like a smart next step. I could ask her neighbors if they’d seen her recently, get a feel for her personality.

The shooting had taken place at Maya’s apartment, which meant that her address was in the file Emori had given me. I’d taken to looking over the documents before I went to bed, so it was within an arm's reach of where I was laying. I glanced over the police report of that night and found her street on the top of the page.

It wasn’t like I was going to the Met Gala, so it didn’t take me long to roll out of bed and slap on some clothes. I wasn’t feeling in the mood for a shower, so I pulled my hair back into a ponytail and pulled a baseball cap overtop. I made a point to check my bruise in the mirror and carefully dabbed some light colored concealer over it to make it look less terrifying. It didn’t cover much, but it was better than nothing. I pulled out a few tufts of hair just to make sure it was hidden as best as it could be. The sweater I pulled out of the hamper was an old UW one I had that was three sizes too big, and I was hoping it would disguise me. I couldn’t risk Cage Wallage or one of his lackies recognizing me snooping around Maya’s building.

Maya’s apartment building was located in a neighborhood on the south outskirts of the city in what was probably the shittiest part of town. It wasn’t really a high density living space—most of the homes were beat-up rentals that were in need of a paint job—but every couple of blocks or so, there was a three or four story building that housed a few tenants. Seattle wasn’t a particularly dangerous city, but the South Park had seen its fair share of crime. It bordered on the industrial sector, and there was no love lost there for the property value. Auto Body shops and appliance stores lined the streets and the smell of sewage permeated the air.

The drive to her place was nearly a half hour from my apartment down the I-5 due to traffic, so by the time I’d gotten ready and gotten myself to her building, it was after ten o’clock. Not exactly the witching hour, so I was hoping I wasn’t going to look too suspicious. As far as I knew, Maya’s apartment wasn’t an active crime scene anymore. I wasn’t expecting any cops to be hanging around, but there was no guarantee.

I did a once over on the mailbox and searched for her name. It was easy to tell which one was Maya’s since the letters were starting to bunch up out of the slot where the mailman was shoving them. I pulled one out and looked it over.

It was her electrical bill, dated two weeks ago from the start of the month. There wasn’t much to look at other than her name and the date, but it gave me a bit to go on. It told me that Maya likely hadn’t been back her since she took off. Her apartment number was labeled on the mailbox and I climbed the stairs to find it, taking them two at a time on my way.

When I got to Maya’s apartment, I knocked a few times and waited. No one answered so I tested the lock. It didn’t budge. I thought about trying my hand at lock picking with my bobby pin, but I figured it would probably just waste more time and wasn’t going to get me anywhere. Instead, I climbed back down the stairs in search of the super. I wasn’t certain that he’d be okay with letting me in, considering I was a perfect stranger, but I dropped the whole bond enforcement line on him and he was more than happy to help, probably used to people coming and going from that apartment since the investigation started. Still, I wiggled my ass for him a bit as I walked away as a thank you with the master set of keys.

Her apartment was barebones and kind of disgusting. Not due to her cleanliness habits, but mostly due to the fact that the building was old and decrepit. The paint on the walls was peeling are there were stains lining the counters in the kitchen. The floors were splitting up at the edges and there were scuff marks from wear leading away from the front door. I couldn’t imagine living here, and it didn’t really look like anyone did. There was barely any furniture and no pictures or decorations hung on the walls. The only indication that anyone had ever lived here was the slightly rumpled bed I made out through the open door of the bedroom.

Hesitantly, I made my way into there. I felt a little bad snooping around a stranger’s home, especially in their bedroom, but if I was going to find anything on Maya, here’s probably where it would be. As I stepped into the room, a sick feeling entered my stomach when I looked at the floor. There was a blotchy, reddish brown stain on the carpet in front of me. It was huge, nearly taking up a couple feet in diameter and I knew what it was immediately upon looking at it. It was what was left of Eric Lovejoy after Bellamy had shot him. It looked like they’d gotten the go ahead to try and clean it, but there was no way they were ever going to get that much blood out of this old carpet. It had likely seeped down into the padding below. Seeing it made me feel even more uneasy, and I made the executive decision that there wasn’t anything worth finding in the apartment. The police had already scoured over it, so anything interesting was already in their possession and I didn’t want to be there anymore.

After booking it from the apartment, I sucked it up and tried knocking on a few doors. Most people were at work this time of day, but I stumbled upon a few elderly people and a single mom. No one had much to say about Maya though other than that she kept to herself and that it was a real tragedy that happened. I thanked them for their time and went about returning the masters to the super and walked out to my car.

My heart nearly dropped when I saw someone leaning against the hood of my Mini. When I realized it was Nathan Miller, I narrowed my eyes at him and marched over to it.

“Are you trying to give me a heart attack?” I snapped.

“I’m waiting here out in the open!” Miller said defensively. “I couldn’t be less offensive.”

“You don’t just wait at someone’s car while they’re looking over a crime scene.” I’d never actually met Miller, so I was making some first impression. I didn’t really care though; false adrenaline was coursing through my veins and I was feeling somewhat punchy.

“Maybe you should stop checking out crime scenes,” he suggested before stretching his hand out. “Nathan Miller.”

“Yeah, I know,” I snapped, ignoring his hand. “What are you doing here, Miller?”

“I thought you’d be more happy to see me. Last time you were able to follow me right to your guy.”

“Last time was a fluke,” I said, though I didn’t really need to tell him that. “You weren’t expecting me.” I did a quick glance around for anyone else who might recognize me. If Miller was able to track me down, so could anyone else. I wasn’t as inconspicuous as I’d thought.

“It’s the car,” Miller explained as if reading my mind. “It’s hard to be incognito when you’re driving around an easter egg on wheels.”

I glanced at my car which he was leaning against before glaring back up at him. The color was a bit of a bright blue, but it was far from an easter egg. My car was cute. It had tiny windshield wipers and fit into almost any parking space.

“You’ve been tailing me,” I said. “At least, you were today.”

“It’s not like you’re making it very hard,” Miller said with a shrug. “I’m actually surprised it took you this long to come to this place. It seems like an obvious starting point.”

“I was a little busy yesterday,” I said through gritted teeth. I didn’t need to get into it with Miller about how I was behind schedule tracking his friend down. Cage Wallace had been a bit of an unforeseen interruption.

“Yeah, about that,” Miller said. “Cage Wallace doesn’t joke around when it comes to business. You’re making a pretty bold move sticking on this case after what happened yesterday.”

“What do you know about what happened yesterday?” I snapped.

“Why do you think I’m tailing you?” He asked. “You think I like watching you drive around in circles looking for clues to find my best friend?”

“You could just tell me where he is and save us both the trouble,” I suggested. Miller let out a bark of laughter at that.

“Nice try,” he chuckled. “But seriously, what are you still doing looking for Bellamy? Cage Wallace wasn’t enough to scare you away?”

“I don’t like not knowing all the answers,” I said. “And things aren’t lining up here.”

“So you’re after Bellamy because what...you like murder mysteries and want to try out a live action version? They’ve got dinner parties for that kind of thing.”

“That’s not what this is!” I insisted. Though I didn’t really have anything better. It was about the money before, and it still kind of was. Things had changed over the past two days. The Wallaces were up to something, and it was keeping me up at night. Bringing in Bellamy Blake was going to get me ten thousand dollars, but digging up Wallace's dirt was going to get me a good night’s sleep. It might also get me a premature grave, but I was trying not to think about that part.

“You’re going to get yourself killed,” Miller said. Apparently, he had no trouble avoiding that subject.

“I’m doing just fine so far,” I snapped at him. “Get off my car,” I said as I walked around the front and slid into the driver’s seat. When I put my key into the ignition and turned it over, the starter popped a few times before giving up. I turned it again and the same thing happened.

“Miller, what did you do to my car?” I exclaimed, jumping out, ready to accost him. He was already jogging across the parking lot to a beat up looking sedan that was sitting on the opposite side of the street.

“Sorry Clarke!” He called at me. “Had to be done.”

Like hell it did.

If he thought this was going to stop me from tracking down Bellamy, he was sorely mistaken. Except, Bellamy’s trail had gone kind of cold since I’d run into him two days ago and it hadn’t been much of a trail to begin with. Miller had been right; I was driving around in circles and now I couldn’t even drive.

With a heavy sigh, I pulled my phone out and called the only person I knew who knew a thing about cars.

“Reyes here,” Raven answered. I’d called her office number, so caller ID hadn’t flagged me.

“I’ve got a bit of an issue,” I told her.

“Clarke? Is everything okay?” I felt bad about worrying her. I knew she still hadn’t gotten over the whole apprehension agent thing, and really, who could blame her for that? I wasn’t exactly killing the game at the moment and I’d nealy gotten myself killed yesterday. Raven probably had a reason to be worried about me.

“Someone jacked with my car,” I explained. “I’m in South Park and it won’t start.”

“What the hell are you doing out there?” Raven asked.

“I was chasing a lead for my case and then this happened,” I said. I was being vague on purpose. I was probably going to tell Raven the truth eventually, just not over the phone.

“So you phoned me?”

“So I phoned you.” I sighed into the receiver and prayed that she would take mercy on me.

“Give me a half hour. I can cut out early once I finish up.”

When Raven got there, I was sitting in my car with the door open scrolling through my phone. I’d opened my social media apps in rotation, not really seeing anything new on my feeds until I’d gotten the bright idea to look up Blake and friends. I typed his name into the search bar, and it came up completely empty, which was odd because I knew he used to have a profile. I assumed, as a cop, it’s probably one of those things you keep at your own risk. He might have deleted it when he joined the force, but that didn’t help me stalk him. I tried looking up Miller’s name, and the same nonsense happened. Maya’s yielded better results, but her profile was locked down from public view. Another bust.

“You’re not really selling me on this whole bounty hunter business, you realize that, right?” Raven asked as she hopped out of her car. Raven drove a bright red Subaru WRX rally car that she basically rebuilt herself after she’d got it at a used car sale a few years back. It was her pride and joy. It was the kind of car that gear heads like Raven died for, and she drove it proudly and fiercely. She was always the first person to bemone my choice of vehicle, but still got me cheap parts when my engine light came on, so I couldn’t complain too much.

“You still came,” I told her. “If you were really trying to prove a point, you would have left me here to die.”

“Well, I wasn’t going to make you sit here in a broken down car where anyone could jump you. I’m trying to keep you safe, not get you mugged.”

“I’m not about to get mugged,” I assured her.

She ignored me and stuck her head under the hood of my car to assess the damage. There were some mutterings that sifted through the metal gap, but for the most part, I kept my distance and let her work.

“That’s your problem right there,” she announced. “Someone stole your distributor cap.”

“How’d they even do that when the car was locked?” I asked incredulously. “Can you open the hood from a locked car?”

“They might have broken in. If they jimmied the lock they could have popped the hood from inside,” Raven suggested. “Did you notice it was unlocked when you got in to start it?”

I hadn’t thought of that. I was so used to people not breaking into my car, that I didn’t check to make sure the locks were actually locked. I just hit the button on the fob like always.

“Clarke, nobody breaks into a car just to take a distributor cap,” Raven told me pointedly. “Someone did this to your car specifically. It had to be a targeted thing..”

I didn’t say anything to that. She was right, but I wasn’t in the mood to fight.

“I'm guessing from your reaction that you already knew that,” Raven sighed. “Well, there’s nothing I can do about it until we get you a new cap. Looks like I’m driving you home.”

“How long will it take to get the part?” I asked.

“Depends,” Raven said with a shrug. “But I’m not getting it for you until you tell me what’s going on.”

I let out an exasperated groan and tossed my head back. “Come on, Reyes,” I whined.

“Come on, Griffin,” she mimicked. Maturity never was our strong suit.

“Raven, I’m not in the mood to have this argument with you. You can’t just abandon my car here until you get your way.”

“I’m not abandoning your car,” Raven said. “At least, not if you tell me what you’re up to.”

“I’m not up to anything,” I lied. I didn’t really have a good reason to lie to Raven other than avoiding the inevitable lecture that was going to come with the truth. Plus, I was feeling stubborn. I didn’t like that she was forcing my hand.

“That’s a load of bull, and you know it,” Raven told me. “Two days of this bounty hunter stuff, and you’re already keeping things from me. We don’t do that Clarke, remember?”

I squeezed my eyes shut as the guilt washed over me. Raven was the closest thing to a sister I’d ever had, and the last time we’d kept something from each other, even though it hadn’t been intentional, we’d ended up in the Finn debacle. Of course, there were things that we didn’t share with each other—she had her past and I had mine—but we told each other about the big studd as it happened.

“It’s not a big deal,” I deflected. “But it’s a long story, so why don’t I tell you on the drive.”

“We can stop at my mechanic on the way,” Raven said with a grin, gesturing to the Subaru for me to get in. At least for a little while, we were going to have to leave the Mini behind. "With any luck, he'll have a cap he can get delivered in for you by tomorrow."

I got straight to the point once we were on the road. Raven was obviously waiting for an explanation and the silence was killing me. I managed to give her the coles notes version, skipping the part about Cage Wallace taking me for a drive and the imminent danger he'd suggested, but she knew the important parts.

“Bellamy fucking Blake,” Raven said in wonder, running a hand over her face after I’d finished my story. Her eyes were still pointed straight at the road, but her mouth had fallen open slightly. “I can’t believe you didn’t tell me that you were stalking Bellamy Blake sooner.”

“I’m not stalking him, Raven!” I exclaimed. “This is my job.”

“Right, of course,” she said in a voice that sounded like she meant the exact opposite of what she’d just said.

“It is!” I insisted. “I didn’t even know it was his name on the file when I asked Murphy for it. I’m in this for the money and nothing more.”

“Say it a couple more times and maybe it will be true,” Raven mumbled with a smirk plastered across her face.

I didn’t dignify it with a response. Raven was going to read into the situation exactly as much as she wanted to, and I knew how it looked. Despite the very real coincidence I found myself in, I couldn’t deny that it all seemed very convenient. I’d likely never convince her that I didn’t orchestrate this whole disaster.

“I give it a couple days before you two are boinking,” she said into the silence.

“Raven!” I shouted.

“I’m serious,” she continued. “Think about it: him, on the run, looking fine as hell. You, chasing after him, discovering all his secrets. This shit writes itself.”

“I’m not boinking Bellamy Blake.”

“Why not? You’ve already done it once and that man is good in bed,” she said. “There’s no way this doesn’t end up with you and Blake boinking.”

“Can we please stop saying the word boink?” I cried. “And for the love of god, can you please stop talking about me sleeping with Blake? It’s not happening.”

“Okay,” she said in that same voice that implied that it was anything but okay. ‘I suppose you’ll have to find him before you can boink him, so I’ll tack on a couple days due to your incompetence.”

“It’s not incompetence,” I said. Raven shot me a sidelong look. “He’s slippery, okay! He’s spent years learning how to find people who don’t want to be found. He’s good at hiding.”

“Maybe you should just admit that you’re not very good at tracking him?”

“What do you know about it?” I snapped. I turned my head towards the window and took a moment to pout. Sure, I wasn’t exactly Nancy Drew yet, but I was a beginner. Becoming a super sleuth took time and patience; granted, I had little of both, but I was doing my best.

“Did you ever think it might be a good idea to enlist your genius best friend for help?”

“Yeah, and who might that be,” I quipped. I couldn’t let her off that easily.

“Shut it, Grif. You know exactly who it is,” she told me.

“Thought you didn’t like this whole bounty hunter thing,” I said with a shrug.

“I don’t, but if helping you gets this whole thing over with faster, I’m not opposed.”

“How exactly are you planning to help?”

“Seriously, Clarke, it’s like you don’t know me at all,” Raven whined with a smirk on her lips. “I’m going to hack into the police department, obviously.”

“Two days ago you were scolding me for chasing criminals and now you want to commit a federal crime?” I exclaimed. I had whiplash from Raven’s behavior. One minute she was parenting me, the next she was light years ahead with a plan that could get us both arrested.

“It’s a harmless crime,” she argued. “And it’s not like I haven’t done it before.”

“That doesn’t make me feel any better!”

“It should,” she urged. “It means I don’t get caught. I’ll be in and out and have all the information on your boy before anyone even notices I’m in there. Clean and simple.”

I mulled it over for a moment instead of arguing with her for the sake of arguing. In my head, it seemed like a decent enough idea. I needed information on Blake and there was likely more to him than what was released in the police report. There was definitely an employee record on file which would give me more insight into his personal life, and with any luck, there might be some details from the shooting that had been left out of the public record. It wasn’t a bad idea, but I didn’t like the thought of getting Raven involved. I’d told her about Roan’s suspicions and mentioned that the Wallaces were shady, but I hadn’t told her about my little meeting with Cage. This whole thing was more dangerous than I was letting on.

“Look, Raven, I’m not going to deny that it would make things a bit easier—

She interrupted me. “Understatement of the century. So far you’ve been going about this thing like you’re an amateur PI in the early twentieth century, Grif. It’s 2018. It’s time to embrace the internet.”

“Would you just let me finish?” I growled. “I appreciate the offer,” I continued. “But it’s too dangerous to get you involved. There’s a lot of stuff I still don’t know about this, and the people behind it aren’t exactly boy scouts.”

“So? Neither are we,” she said with a shrug.

“We’re not exactly hardened criminals,” I reminded her.

“You’ve jumped headfirst into this without a second thought. Why is it so bad if I want to help?”

“I didn’t exactly know what I was getting into before I started,” I admitted.

“It’s not like I’m gonna help you tackle Bellamy down in the street and haul him into the police station,” Raven said. “I’m just gonna scroll through some police documents, maybe look into to that Wallace guy you were talking about.”

“No!” I nearly screamed. I clenched my eyes shut before continuing. “Don’t poke around into the Wallaces, okay? That’s just a recipe for trouble.”

“Okay fine,” she huffed. “But you can’t stop me from getting into those police records.”

“God, you’re impossible,” I groaned, pinching the bridge of my nose.

“Takes one to know one,” Raven said, grinning at me.

We made a few stops, including at the mechanic to put in an order for my distributor cap, and eventually Raven brought us back to her apartment. She needed her proper computer to break into the police database and mumbled something about my laptop not having enough power to handle that sort of thing. My laptop was five years old and begging for me to kill it, but it didn’t matter because I didn’t do things like hack into government files. It served its purpose and that purpose was watching Netflix and scrolling through Twitter. I owed that thing my life too after it carried me through college.

Raven’s computer, on the other hand, looked like it was an actual spaceship. She’d built it herself from parts she’d bought online. To my untrained eye, it sort of looked like a regular computer with a few fancy LEDs; the sleek black box that glowed red was hooked up to three different monitors in what could only be described as a shrine at the back of her living room. It took up more space than the couch set up in front of her TV and that was just how Raven liked it.

“Give me a couple minutes and I’ll hopefully have something good,” she told me as she clacked away on her keyboard. The sound it made as she typed was deafening, and I walked into the kitchen to get a drink of water to avoid it.

I had barely sat back down on the couch when Raven started mumbling to herself.

“This is weird,” she said, her attention on the screen and not on m.

“What is?”

“There’s a block on Blake’s file,” Raven explained.

“Isn’t that normal?”

“No, this is different,” Raven said. “It’s like...I’m scanning the system for his name or any images or connections to him, and it’s spitting out generic documents like the list of graduates from his year at the police academy or an article about him from college.”

“Aren’t those things that would be included in a search on his name?”

“Those things should be buried deep,” Raven explained. “I’m going chronologically, so the first thing that pops up should be from four years ago. I’m trying to find the most recent files, but it looks like there’s an algorithm in place that’s generating random hits to cover them up.”

“So it’s apart of the security in place on the police database?”

“No,” Raven said. “I mean, yes, this was done internally as in someone went into the system and programmed this in, but there’s no way the department authorized this sort of block on Blake. It’s keeping people who are in the system from looking at relevant files on him. It’s impeding their search.”

“So you don’t think it was done on purpose,” I suggested.

“Oh, it was done on purpose, it just wasn’t done by the Seattle PD. My guess is Bellamy’s got some talented friends helping him. I’m surprised SPD’s tech guy hasn’t already taken this down.”

“You can get around it?” I asked.

“I already have,” Raven said, turning in her chair and smirking at me. I looked past her at the middle monitor to see a system interface that looked like it was taken straight from 1996. Raven had entered Bellamy’s name into the search and brought up every file that was relevant to him in the police database. It dated back to his acceptance to the police academy, included his employee record and a history of every case he’d ever worked on. It also included files that weren’t connected to his work as a cop as well as his arrest record from the night Lovejoy was shot. There were a few video files and some external images, but for the most part, it looked like case records.

“Look right there,” I said. I was standing behind Raven now and pointed at the screen. She slapped my hand away when my finger got too close to the glass. “That file has Maya Vie’s name on it in conjunction with Bellamy’s. Open it up.”

Raven pulled up the document and we scanned it over quickly. It looked like an open investigation into the Wallace family, but that didn’t come as much of a shock. I’d already figured he was looking into them, I just hadn’t known it was made official by the SPD. My eyes trailed down the document, but I didn’t understand a lot of it. There were details about Dante Wallace’s business and suspected associates, along with Cage’s. What caught my eye was towards the bottom of the page when I noticed Maya’s name again.

Raven picked up on it as well and scrolled down and highlighted the line in question to make it easier to read.

“Confidential Informant, Maya Vie, paralegal at Tsing & Associates, romantically involved with Cage Wallace,” Raven read out loud and I sucked in a breath.

“Maya’s a police informant?” I asked even though we’d both just read it at the same time.

“I guess so,” Raven said with a shrug. She wasn’t as invested in this as I was.

“That makes so much sense,” I said. She’d phoned Bellamy that night because she’d been working with Bellamy this entire time. Maya was feeding him information on the Wallaces and putting her own life at risk. “That’s probably why Miller fucked with my car. I knew Maya was important, but I didn’t know just how much.”

“You’re thinking that he wanted to keep you off the trail?”

“I mean, yeah, why else would he steal my distributor cap?”

“Maybe he just wanted to fuck with you.”

I shrugged. Maybe he did, but it didn’t change the fact that finding Maya Vie just became even more important. I if I found her, I’d probably find Bellamy too because if he wasn’t hiding her, he was definitely looking for her; that is, if she wasn’t already dead.

“How many people would know about Maya being a CI?” I asked Raven.

“Bellamy and whoever he was working on this case with if he had a partner, the captain of his department probably and any higher ups who are interested in the case. This file wouldn’t be available to anyone without security clearance” Raven said. “I don’t know for sure though. I’m an engineer, not an FBI agent.”

 

* * *

  

Raven dropped me off at my apartment later that night and promised to get my car sorted in the morning. For a second, we’d both thought about having an old school slumber party at her apartment, but neither of us were really in the mood, me least of all. I was grateful for her help, but I was desperate for some alone time to think things over.

Discovering that Maya was a police informant was huge, and, though I wouldn’t admit it to Raven, I would never have learned that without her. Things were starting to come together and make sense. There was no way she was under police protection right now, not when the police were under the Wallaces thumb. She likely had help, and I was willing to bet that Bellamy Blake had something to do with it.

I was taking the steps two at a time on the way up and nearly stumbled when I heard the sharp ring of my phone. Ignoring it, I continued my way up and figured if it was important, the person would leave a message. I’d reached my door and was fumbling for my keys when it went off again.

Call me paranoid, but the last few days had taught me that there were very few coincidences in this life. When my phone rang for the third time and I still hadn’t opened my door, I finally picked up.

Heavy breathing answered me on the other side.

“Who is this?” I demanded, hoping the shake of my voice didn’t transfer through the phone line.

The breathing continued on and my blood ran cold. Not knowing who was on the other end was giving me a sick feeling. I didn't want to hang up without anything to show for it, but I didn't want to just sit and listen to them.

“Why are you calling me?” I said, my voice sounding stronger this time. I was getting angry. What sort of sicko just phoned and breathed? I was sick of being played with and treated like I wasn’t a threat. I wasn’t just some toy for entertainment and I had a real stake in all of this.

“If you don’t tell me, I’m going to trace the call,” I lied. It sounded really official though, so I ran with it. It definitely sounded like something Raven could do if she were here. “My friend is already narrowing in on your location. I’ll know who you are in just a few seconds.”

They hung up and I was left with empty silence.

The breath that I didn’t know I’d been holding escaped my lungs and I was overwhelmed by the relief that washed over me. It wasn’t like I couldn’t handle a creep on the phone, but my life had been in jeopardy enough times this past week to know it wasn’t just a prank call. Whoever was calling meant to scare me, and they’d succeeded.

I could hear Wells’ voice in my head telling me that if I was legitimately scared, I should shut this whole search down, but I ignored it.

My hand made contact with the cool metal of my front door key in my purse and a hastily jammed it in the lock and slammed the door behind me. I let my back rest against the wood for a moment and leaned my head back, closing my eyes for just a moment while I caught my breath.

“Evening, Princess,” someone said from inside my apartment and my purse dropped from my hand. I whipped my head up only to see the shadow of Bellamy Blake sitting at the foot of my bed right with a smug expression on his face.

I scrambled to grab my purse, dipping to the floor and sifting through the piles of crap inside it.

“Looking for this?” He asked, and I glanced up to see my tiny pistol dangling between his thumb and forefinger in front of his face. “Must have left it behind this morning.”

“What the hell are you doing here, Bellamy?” I snapped. A sane person might be terrified to find a man in their apartment sitting on their bed, but even I had to admit, there were worse people who could break into my apartment.

He smirked. “Can’t I just stop by to say hi?’

“No, that’s not really you,” I said. “One and done is more your style.”

“You’re still hung up on that?”

“How did you even get in here?” I asked. “My door was locked.”

“Your window wasn’t,” he said with a shrug.

“I live on the fourth floor!”

“Right, you should mention to your building manager that your fire escape needs some serious maintenance. The thing is practically rusted into pieces.”

“I don’t give a fuck about my fire escape Bellamy!” I shouted and nearly stomped my foot like a toddler in frustration.

“You would if there was a fire.”

“I’m not in the mood for this right now, and I seriously doubt you’re planning on hanging around long enough for the cops to get here to pick you up, so what do you want?”

“Is that still your plan then? Get the jump on me and call the cops. It’s not gonna work, Princess, but I doubt anything you try will.”

“You didn’t just come here to bicker with me,” I said. “And I’ve got things to do, so...” I trailed off, gesturing for him to get on with it.

“How’s your car doing?”

“Oh Jesus,” I groaned as I realized he was doing this just to piss me off. Knowing that didn’t stop it from working, it just managed to piss me off even more. I may not have any food, but I sure as hell had booze and I was feeling far too sober to be having a conversation with Bellamy Blake. Making a beeline for the kitchen, I snatched a bottle of wine down from the cupboard above my stove and went to work uncorking it.

“It’s just a question,” he said in mock defense. “Those Mini Coopers are unreliable as fuck. You should really think about getting something that’s less of a money hole.”

“My car would be fine if it wasn’t for Miller stealing parts from it!” I exclaimed. “Are you going to keep going? I’m trying to get an idea of how long this is going to take.”

“I thought you wanted to find me, Princess,” he chuckled. “Now I’m here and you can’t seem to wait to get rid of me.”

“This right here isn’t going to end with me getting a ten thousand dollar check with my name on it,” I said, gesturing between us with the glass of wine I’d just poured for myself.

“I don’t get that,” Bellamy said, switching gears. “What does a Princess like you need ten thousand dollars for, huh? Don’t you have a pile of gold hidden somewhere in a vault or something?”

“None of your business, Blake,” I snapped.

“It’s kind of my business considering you’ve decided to fuck with my life,” he said. “The way I see it, you’re just doing it because of some sort of vendetta you have against me for something that happened five years ago, and you’re stupid enough to put your life on the line in order to do it.”

“That’s not what this is about.”

“That’s the only reason I can think of.”

“So you came over here because you’re curious about my motives?” I scoffed.

“I came over here because you’re reckless and stupid and about to get yourself killed” he growled. He stood up from his seat on the bed and glared at me. “Cage Wallace isn’t a person you want to fuck with. None of the Wallaces are, but that one in particular is a fucking psycho and you’re on his radar now.”

“I can handle Cage Wallace,” I lied before taking a long gulp of wine.

Bellamy let out a bark of laughter at that, but his eyes glinted with something that wasn’t humor. “I’m sure you think that, Princess,” he said.

“I’m not an idiot, Bellamy, and I already got the lecture from Miller, so if you’re done…” I trailed off and gestured towards the door. I had half a mind to tell him to crawl out the window the way he came, but something told me I probably wasn’t in a great spot to try to force him to do that.

“You ever stop to think that this little attempt at getting a thrill is endangering more than just your own life?” He asked.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” I snapped.

“Showing up at Maya’s apartment? You’re drawing attention to yourself and you're making it a lot harder for me to do my job.” 

“You’ve been suspended from the department since you’ve been charged with murder, in case you don’t remember, so you don’t have a job. You’re a fugitive” I said.

“Semantics,” he said with a shrug before striding the few short steps it took him to stand in front of me across the kitchen counter. “I need you to let this go.”

“Not gonna happen,” I told him, swirling my wine in its glass.

“Why not?” He shouted, throwing his hands up in exasperation. “Any other person would have run off with their tail between their legs by this point, but not you! Instead, you’re snooping around police files, risking your own life and every life of the people involved in this. It’s reckless and stupid and selfish.”

“It’s not my fault that you’re on the run from the police and the Wallaces,” I snapped. A hot, wave of anger crashed over me at the implication that I was somehow risking lives. The only life I was putting in danger was my own, and maybe Raven, but I’d tried to stop her.

“I’m not talking about me!” He snarled. “There are more people involved than you realize. This whole damn thing is bigger than you, but obviously, you don’t know that because it’s none of your damn business!”

“You mean Maya? I know she’s a police informant, so if you’re trying to say that I somehow—”

“I’m not talking about Maya either,” he said. “I’m telling you, there are people working on this and things you don’t know, so just back the fuck off.”

“You really think telling me that there are things I don’t know is going to convince me to stop looking into this?”

“A sane person would have given up after Cage Wallace threatened their life!”

“Oh please, like you're not more concerned about Cage Wallace putting a bullet between your eyes,” I scoffed with fake confidence. “If I catch you and turn you into the cops, you’re worried they’re going to be in Dante Wallace’s pocket.”

“You couldn’t be further from the truth,” he said, his voice low and gravely. “I haven’t given much thought to you turning me in because it’s never going to happen.”

“If you’re not worried, then why are you here?” I asked.

“I’m not worried about you catching me,” he said. “I’m worried about everyone else you're putting at risk by going through with this.”

“You mean Maya?” I asked, pushing for more info. If there was ever a time to grill Blake, this was it.

“None of your business,” he told me, repeating his words from earlier. I was getting sick of hearing it. Whether or not Bellamy thought it was my business, I was going to make it mine. “What’s it going to take to get you to drop this?” He asked me, leaning over the counter.

“I’m not dropping this,” I told him, and it was the truth. I was in it now, so even if I wanted to drop it, I couldn’t. That wasn’t how my brain worked. There was so much to this that I didn’t understand and so much that I needed to get to the bottom of—it was bigger than just catching Bellamy, even if I wasn’t going to admit that to him out loud.

“Jesus, Clarke! You never make things easy, do you?”

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

“Nothing,” he scoffed. “This was a mistake,” he said quickly before taking a step away from the counter and turning his back on me.

“No, you don’t get to do that,” I insisted, stepping around the island and striding towards him. His back was to me, but I pulled him around by the shoulder. He didn’t put up much of a fight. “You don’t get to break into my apartment, talk down to me like I’m a child and then shut down when I call you out on your bullshit.”

“And you don’t get to act like you’re owed any sort of explanation,” Bellamy growled.

“Considering you’re breaking and entering, I think I do.” I poked my finger into his chest menacingly, or what I thought seemed menacing, but I don’t think it translated. He snatched my finger into his own hand and pulled me in closer to him.

“Are you doing this for the adrenaline rush? Does it turn you on?” He asked. “Is your life seriously that boring that you have to insert yourself into mine to get some sort of excitement?”

“It’s not like that,” I scoffed at him, rolling my eyes, but not moving away. His other hand trailed down to my hip and I sucked in an involuntary gasp.

“Then what is it about?” He asked. There was still a hint of a smirk on his lips, but when his eyes met mine, the arrogance and smugness had been replaced by something softer. I had to look away for fear of crumbling beneath his scrutiny. “You really hate me that much, Princess?”

“No, I—” I hesitated, unsure how to approach it. A part of me knew that Bellamy wasn’t the villain here and knew that he didn’t deserve a life sentence or a death sentence for what he did. “I know too much,” I settled on. “I’ve been in a position like that before and left it alone and I can’t do that again.”

“So you think that turning me in is the answer to that?” Bellamy asked.

“It was the start of it,” I explained. “But now…”

“Now what?” He implored, pulling me in tighter to him and ghosting his lips over my ear. A rush of heat flooded to my center and my pulse quickened.

“I want to do the right thing,” I admitted, unsure why I was being so forthcoming. I wasn’t even sure if that was really the truth, but it felt right somewhere deeper inside of me. And if I were being perfectly honest, it was a miracle that I found any words to say at all with the feeling of Bellamy’s hot breath on my neck and the awareness of how close our bodies were pressed together. It was all my mind could really focus on.

“The Wallaces are bad people and I want to—” I never got a chance to finish my sentence because Bellamy was crashing his lips against mine. There was nothing soft or gentle about it. His lips met mine with fervor and a neediness that reflecting the warmth that was spreading in my belly. Without thinking about it too much, I let my hands explore his body, slipping my fingers beneath his shirt so that I could feel his feverish skin against the palm of my hand. A moan fell from my lips and I broke the kiss to lean my head back and catch my breath and he trailed bruising kisses down my jaw and neck until his lips found my collarbone. I could feel his hand playing with the hem of my shirt and was tempted to take it off myself and get to the good stuff.

I guided his face back up to mine, chasing his lips back into another kiss. Just as they connected, he pulled back away and pushed me back firmly with both his hands. A whimper escaped my lips involuntarily and I ached for the closeness of his body. The sudden separation felt like being drenched in a bath of ice water.

“Stop trying to play the hero, Princess,” he told me before turning away. “Before it gets you killed.”

It was all I could do to keep from running after him and losing the last shred of dignity I had left. The door swung shut leaving me alone in the empty apartment and wound up tight and wanting.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading! Comments and kudos are always appreciated. Most of all, I hope you enjoyed the chapter!


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wow! What a gap between chapters. I'm so sorry about that, and I want to reassure you that this fic is not abandoned. I've got a lot of excuses, most having to do with school, but quite honestly, this chapter gave me a bit more trouble than the first few. I'm happy with how it turned out though, and hope you like it too! 
> 
> Parts are starting to move in this chapter and we get a bit more insight into what's actually going on. I won't say much more, but I promise that things are about to get interesting. 
> 
> Anyways, I hope you enjoy this chapter!

* * *

 

 

When I came barrelling through the front door of Murphy’s office, no one was expecting me. The bell nearly swung off the hook and papers fluttered up into the air. Emori was sat behind the desk again. A bandana holding back her hair was the only thing that kept it from whipping around her face as I marched up to her.

 

“I’m a complete disaster at this job,” I admitted, planting my hands down in front of her and staring her down.

 

“Does that give you an excuse to waltz in here like you own the place?” She asked me, narrowing her eyes before glancing down at the mess I’d made in my wake. I’d been going for dramatic, but I suppose it hadn’t landed.

 

“I thought you weren’t the receptionist,” I said skeptically.

 

“Doesn’t mean I want to sit here in a pigsty,” she said with a shrug. I glanced around the shithole that Murphy called an office. While there wasn’t exactly a high standard in the bail bonding business, Murphy’s taste in office furniture wasn’t particularly raising the bar for the competition. He knew his clientele—low lives and people with no other options—and wasn’t trying to pretend otherwise. With or without the papers on the floor, the place was disgusting.

 

“Why are you sitting here at all if you’re not the receptionist?”

 

“Jasper’s still out,” she explained. “Besides, it’s none of your damn business.

 

“Jeez, who spat in your cereal this morning?” I asked with a scoff.

 

Emori stuck me with an unimpressed look and frowned. “Are you here for a reason? I got better things to do than listen to you whine.”

 

I blew a puff of air up at the hair that had fallen into my face and rolled my eyes. I was being extra, but I was in an irritable mood. I’d spent the entire night tossing and turning until finally, unable to find a position that was comfortable, I'd given up on sleep entirely. When I would finally start to drift off to bed, my mind would flicker to what had happened between me and Bellamy, and there was no way I was entertaining that nonsense. Safe to say, my night was restless and I was feeling it now that the morning sun was piercing my sensitive eyes and the smog of the city was settling in my lungs.

 

“I’m terrible at this job,” I repeated, “And I’m never going to find Bellamy before the deadline.”

 

“Didn't Roan give you some pointers?”

 

“They don’t work on Bellamy,” I told her. It wasn’t like Roan had given me the holy bible on bounty hunting. He’d brought me to a shady gun shop and showed me how to turn the safety off before handing the clerk a wad of cash and hooking a pair of handcuffs into the loop of my belt. If he thought that counted as showing me the ropes, then he was a worse teacher than I was a bounty hunter.

 

“Maybe you just don’t know how to use them,” she suggested. “In theory, Roan’s methods should work, but he’s also been doing this for a while.”

 

“He didn’t really show me a method,” I explained.

 

“So you don’t know what you’re doing and you don’t have any practice,” Emori sighed. “Remember when I told you I bet money on you? That was supposed to make you take this seriously.”

 

“I am taking it seriously!” I insisted, but it sounded whiny even to my ears. It wasn’t like I was trying to be a fuck up—I just wasn’t used to having to work for stuff. Listening to Emori scold me for my lack of effort put things in perspective though. I hadn’t really been trying to get good at this job; I’d just thought I could throw myself head first into catching Bellamy Blake and hope for the best. That wasn’t how things worked.

 

“Okay, I’ll admit that I could be going about things differently,” I said.

 

“You think?” Emori asked, cocking an eyebrow at me. “Look, here’s a stack of smaller skips that might be a bit easier for you to handle. You could even call Roan again and get him to show you how it’s supposed to go down when you know what you’re doing. It’s not really the type of stuff he usually deals with, but hell, he might make an exception.”

 

“What sort of stuff does he usually deal with?”

 

“Stuff that you shouldn’t concern yourself with,” she said.

 

An hour later, I was sitting in Roan’s truck. Last time I’d been in it, the only thing on my mind was the fact that I’d nearly been killed by Cage Wallace; I hadn’t really had the chance to observe my surroundings.

 

I hated it.

 

Getting into the monster of a vehicle had nearly winded me and once I was sat down in the passenger’s seat, my feet barely grazed the floor of the cab. I felt like a child, and I’m certain I looked like one too sitting next to Roan whose biceps were wider than my head.

 

“Don’t you have something less desperate for attention?” I grumbled as he pulled away from Murphy’s parking lot. Raven had given me a ride to Murphy’s since my car was still out of commision, so I’d had to wait around for Roan to pick me up.

 

“Says the woman who drives around the most obnoxious car I’ve ever seen in my life,” Roan said. “I noticed that eye sore wasn’t in the parking lot.”

 

“It’s getting detailed,” I said. Detailed could entail a lot of things, though I supposed most of the time it didn’t mean getting a stolen part replaced. Asking Roan for help, yet again, was already humiliating enough. Sitting in his truck, the size of an oompa loompa in comparison to him, I wasn’t really in the mood to share the story of the distributor cap. Raven promised my car would be back in working condition by the end of the day; Roan didn’t need to know more than that.

 

“How’s tracking Blake going?” He asked.

 

“It’s not,” I admitted. At this point, my efforts barely counted as tracking. The two times I’d run into Bellamy, he’d been completely in control. Plus, the second time, I’d had nothing to do with it. He felt comfortable enough that I was horrible at my new job to come to me. He knew I couldn’t catch him, but I was about to change that. The next time Bellamy and I met, he wouldn’t be getting away so easily, though I still wasn’t completely certain what I was going to do once I had him. That was future Clarke’s problem though—my focus was on practicing the job. With any luck, the skills I’d pick up from Roan might help me get more information on the Wallaces to boot.

 

“Can’t help it if he’s in the wind.”

 

“He’s not in the fucking wind,” I snarled. “He’s just slippery.” Whatever the hell that meant.

 

“Right.” Roan drawled, glancing over at me with a twinkle in his eye. We pulled out from Murphy’s parking lot and turned out onto the street. “Where to first, boss?”

 

I flicked through the stack of files that Emori gave me trying to find someone who looked slow and stupid. My eyes landed on a drunkard who skipped bail on a public indecency charge.

 

“This guy looks good. His name’s Lorne Dodd.” I told Roan before spouting off his last known address.

 

“What’s his damage?”

 

“He took a piss outside a hair salon,” I read off the page. “There’s like a dozen elderly witnesses who made statements. He traumatized them all with his junk.”

 

“You really need my help on this one?” Roan asked me, giving me a sidelong glance.

 

“Shouldn’t we start from the easiest and work our way up?” I asked.

 

“Whatever you want,” he said with a shrug. “Depending on my schedule, I might not have much more time to help you after today though and I don’t want to waste both our time on some lowlife who’s probably plastered on his couch right now.”

 

“Right,” I agreed without really knowing what else to say. I bit down on my lip and tried to avoid embarrassment with the wording of my next question. “Hypothetically though, if I were going to bring this guy in on my own, how would I do that?”

 

“Knock on his door, pretend to be a pizza delivery and then handcuff him,” Roan said as if it were an everyday encounter.

 

“That sounds kind of kinky,” I said.

 

“Trust me, the types of guys you’re going to bringing in will be gross enough there won’t be anything kinky about it,” he reassured me. “Though, there is a chance that they might not be wearing any pants, so do with that what you will.”

 

“Yuck,” I groaned. “I really didn’t want that picture in my brain.”

 

Roan shrugged without saying anything else.

 

I continued sifting through the pages trying to find something more up to Roan’s standards without getting too far over my head. There were a few armed robbery skips, a stalker, and a sex offender.

 

“How about this one?” I asked. “Arsonist, jumped bail, first time offender. Her name is Susan Steller. She lives on the south side of town.”

 

We were stopped at a red light, so Roan took advantage and scanned over the file. His face was pulled into a frown, but I’d come to realize that didn’t really mean much with him.

 

“Works for me,” he said before pulling into the left turn lane. He flicked his blinker on and I hunkered in for the ride.

 

Without much else to go on, I read over the file a dozen times on the way. Other than her name and her offense, there wasn’t really much about Susan Steller in there.

 

While Roan managed to steer us in the general direction of Susan’s address, once we neared the right neighborhood, the GPS became a necessity. We ended up next to a bargain grocery store that looked like it hadn’t been painted since 1972. Next door to the grocery store was an empty lot and across the street was the address we’d punched into the GPS. It was a short stacked apartment building that sat on top of a couple of businesses including a pizza parlor and a laundromat. The perfect combination.

 

“Okay so how do we play this?” I asked, suddenly feeling eager.

 

“Well, what have you tried before that hasn’t worked?”

 

I made a face. “I haven’t really tried,” I admitted. “Bellamy’s been my only skip so far and it’s not like I’ve tried anything specific. Every time I run into him, it’s pure, dumb luck.”

 

“Right, well the most important thing is that you’ve got me as back up,” Roan explained. “You’re green, so you’re gonna want to have back up as much as possible. We’ll try to work this as if you’re on your own though.”

 

“So how do I start?” I asked.

 

“If the perp is at home, you knock, wait for them to answer and then try to convince them to come with you quietly. If they resist, you're within your rights to make a citizen’s arrest.”

 

“I have to arrest them?” I exclaimed. 

 

“Only if they resist,” Roan repeated with a shrug.

 

“And I’m just supposed to walk up to her door on my own?” I asked. I was all for being a strong independent woman. I lived on my own, paid my own bills and occasional I could boil water long enough to cook pasta. Empowering myself and other women was my jam, but I wasn’t too proud to admit that when it came to physical prowess and strength, I wasn’t exactly a perfect specimen. If it came down to man handling a perp to the police station, I wasn't entirely convinced that I would win that fight.

 

“Worst case scenario, you’ve got the gun I gave you, right?” He asked me nonchalantly.

 

I stared back at him in horror. “You don’t actually think I’m going have to use that thing, do you?”

 

“Probably not, but it’s a good idea to have it just in case,” he told me. “So do you have it with you?”

 

I tentatively pulled the gun from my purse with two fingers and held it up for Roan. “I'm still not really okay with using it, but I have it."

 

"It can just be for show just in case," he reassured me. "It's about controlling the situation."

 

"As long as I don't have to use it, I'm good with it," I said. 

 

“Alright then, go get em,” Roan told me and reach across me to open the passenger's door. “I’ll be waiting at the front entrance to her building in case she makes a run for it, but you’ve got this. Just be confident.”

 

Be confident. That was easier said than done. I toppled out of the truck and walked across the parking lot before entering the building. Unlike newer buildings, there was no buzzer system to get inside. The glass door that led inside was unlocked and a sticker pasted to it stated that the doors were locked after 11 pm. My thoughts drifted momentarily to safety and the type of people who wouldn’t mind living in an all-access building, but I quickly squashed them down. I was here for a job and nothing more. I needed to be confident.

 

Steller’s apartment number was listed in the file, and I climbed the carpeted stairs of her building until I reached her floor. It wasn’t exactly the Ritz. The once white, now beige carpet was worn and stained from years of tread and the building smelled faintly of cigarette smoke. I had the sudden urge to douse a load of hand sanitizer across my entire body, but I powered through.

 

When I reached her door, I rapped three firm knocks against the door and waited.

 

In my mind, I played over the loose script Roan had given me to use. He’d told me to keep things short, straightforward and clear and not to get caught up in whatever sob story the perp was going to lay on me. They always had an excuse, he warned me, and it didn’t matter what it was.

 

“The law’s the law, babe,” he’d said earlier in the truck.

 

When Steller opened the door, she looked like she’d just gotten out of bed. She was wearing loose fitting pajamas and her hair was falling out of a bun that was sagging at the back of her head. She had sallow skin and dark eyes, and look as if she were in need of a shower. I couldn’t really judge her too much considering she wasn’t exactly expecting company. Still, I’d sort of hoped she’d be put together and easy to talk to. Her lack of hygiene and general demeanor wasn’t projecting an easy conversation type of woman.

 

“What’s it?” She snapped. At the very least, I appreciated that she got straight to business.

 

“Are you Susan Steller?” I asked.

 

“Maybe,” she said. “Who’s asking?”

 

“My name is Clarke Griffin,” I introduced myself. “I work for John Murphy’s Office. Do you remember who that is?”

 

Her eyes narrowed and she glanced me up and down. I hoped I was giving off an air of competence, or at least not an air of complete lack of experience. I was trying to be friendly enough not to spook her.

 

“John Murphy, huh?” She said, thinking it over. “Never heard of him.”

 

“Miss Steller, you’re in violation of your bond agreement with Mr. Murphy, so I’m going to have to ask you come down to the station with me to get that worked out.”

 

“That doesn’t sound right,” Steller told me.

 

“You missed your court date,” I explained. “But you can easily reschedule your appointment at the station.”

 

“Fuck that,” she snapped. “I’m not rescheduling nothing.”

 

“It’ll only take a few minutes. I’d be happy to drive you to the station myself,” I told her. Technically I wouldn’t be driving, Roan would, but I doubted she cared much about the specifics.

 

“You said John Murphy sent you?” Susan asked and I nodded. “It’s coming back to me now. I know who that scumbag is.”

 

“Murphy is your bond agent,” I reminded her. “And it’s in his and your best interest to reschedule your court date.”

 

She narrowed her eyes at me again and glanced down. Without warning, she reached across the threshold of her door and snatched my purse out of my hand before quickly slamming the door in my face.

 

“Hey!” I exclaimed, pounding my fist against the closed door. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

 

I could hear her rummaging through the thin barrier and continued pounding away against it. With every hit of my fist, the door rattled, but it didn’t bust open.

 

“Get lost Blondie!” Steller shouted through the door.

 

“Not without my stuff!” I shouted back. My whole life was inside my purse—I kept my keys, my wallet, my phone, and my chapstick in there. Without it, my life was about to get a hell of a lot worse.

 

And then I realized the last, very important thing that I’d recently started to keep in there. My heart plummeted as I realized I’d quite literally handed over a highly dangerous weapon along with the ammo to shoot it with to a criminal. Stuck between wanted to run for my life and wanting to kick in Susan Steller’s door, I remain planted to the ground. I could always go get Roan to come help, but I’d have to run all the way downstairs to get him since Steller had my phone. I didn’t want to leave her alone for that long.

 

“Give me my stuff!” I continued to shout and banged on the door. I nearly lost my balance when the door suddenly reopened. Susan stood in front of me, holding my purse over her shoulder as if she’d just bought it at the store.

 

“What are you yelling about, Blondie?” She snapped. “I got neighbors, you know.”

 

“That’s my stuff you’re holding!”

 

“That doesn’t seem right,” she said. “This stuff here looks like my stuff.”

 

“You literally snatched it from me,” I exclaimed. “And you missed your court date which means you're a criminal, so I’m going to tell you to cooperate one last time and if you don’t listen, you and me are gonna have a problem.” I was hoping she was stupid enough to be threatened by me. Roan had told me to be confident and that was pretty much the only play I had left.

 

“I don’t gotta do nothing for you, Blondie,” she told me. “You got nothing to stand on seeing as I’ve got your gun now.”

 

My face fell. I could feel my heart hammering against my chest, but I was trying to think my way out of it. She wasn’t holding the gun in her hand, so I was pretty sure she didn’t want to use it. There was still a chance she could be talked down.

 

“Listen, I came up here on my own as a courtesy, woman to woman, because I thought we might make things easy, you know. But I’ve got a partner waiting for me downstairs and he isn’t as nice as me. You don’t want me to go get him.”

 

“Bring him up here,” she scoffed at me. She thrust her hand into my purse and pulled out the gun, waving it towards me. “As a matter of fact, why don’t I go get him myself!”

 

I made a move to block her, but she gave me a shove as she charged passed me that knocked me hard on my ass. I scrambled to my feet as I watched her barrel down the hallway, my gun in her hand, my purse over her shoulder.

 

The world was a blur and my heart was pounding in my ears. I could barely focus on my feet as I clambered to the. I sprinted after her and tried to call out a warning to Roan. Steller wasn’t too far in front of me, but I wasn’t exactly an Olympic sprinter and Roan wasn’t expecting her. I didn’t know whether Steller had bothered to load the damn gun before taking off. It didn’t matter—either way, the woman was a lunatic and dangerous and there was no way in hell I was letting her take off with my goddamn purse.

 

When I reached the ground floor, I spotted Steller making her away across the lot. I hadn’t noticed it earlier, but she wasn’t wearing any shoes and her bare feet weren’t doing her any favors on the gravel. With the advantage of shoes and a fiery rage fuelling me, I took off after her and body slammed myself into her when I finally caught up.

 

We crashed together and Steller let out an audible groan before the tangled mess of our bodies tumbled to the ground. We scuffled for a moment and I scrambled to get my hands on the gun. I wasn’t exactly strong, but I was sure as hell determined, so after some rolling around, I managed to come out on top, gun in hand. It was my goddamn gun and I wanted it back. I also wanted to put an end to this whole thing so I pointed it at her and snarled.

 

“Don’t move!” I screamed. “Don’t fucking move or I’ll shot!” Straddling Steller with both my legs, I stared her down until she gave up. Behind me, I heard footsteps approaching and glance behind me for a second to see Roan hobbling up behind me.

 

“Roll her on her back,” he ordered, his voice sounding strained. I did as I was told, and Roan reached down and snapped the handcuffs over her wrists. When Steller was safely secured, I lifted myself off her and dusted myself off before turning to Roan.

 

“That lunatic shot me,” Roan exclaimed and I stared at him in stunned silence. I hadn't even heard the shot go off. “She actually fucking shot me! I went to the trouble to wear a damn kevlar vest, and guess where she fucking shot me!” I glanced at Roan’s chest only to see his shirt perfectly intact. “That’s right!” He continued, “She shot me in the goddamn leg like an idiot!”

 

My eyes drifted down to the leg he’d been favoring before and almost keeled over. A dark red stain was blossoming through his jeans. The sudden urge to vomit rose in my throat and I swallowed it down.

 

“Holy shit,” I exclaimed. “That’s a real gunshot.” I felt jittery like I’d have three shots of a double espresso in less than ten minutes. Susan Steller had actually shot him with my damn gun because I’d been stupid enough to let her get it.

 

“It’s nothing,” Roan reassured me. “Except for my pride.”

 

“You're bleeding,” I said stupidly.

 

“Flesh wound, babe,” he told me. “I’ve had worse.”

 

We dragged Steller over to the curb and Roan started to roll the leg of his jeans up to get a better look. “Can you phone ahead to the police?” He asked me. “Let them know that we’ve got a perp that needs picking up. I’ve gotta call someone to come and get me.”

 

“You’re not going to the hospital?” I asked.

 

“I’ve got a guy,” he explained. “Nothing to worry about.”

 

It didn’t seem like nothing, but I didn’t have any experience with this sort of thing, so my judgment was skewed. If Roan said he was fine, he likely was. And if he said he had a guy, that was his business, but I couldn’t deny that it bothered me. I wanted him to get a real doctor to check him out—actually, I wanted him to have never gotten shot in the first place. My eyes were fixated on the scarlet stain on his leg while we waited for our respective rides. He told me again not to worry, but it was all I could think about.

 

A black Escalade pulled up and Roan stood. 

 

“You good here?” He asked. I nodded numbly feeling silly that he was the one asking me if I was good. He was the one who'd been grazed by a bullet. The police would be there soon and Steller wasn’t proving to be too much of an issue now that she was restrained. I had my teeth gritted together to keep them from clattering and did my best to give Roan a weak smile before he stepped into the car.

 

“Thank you,” I called after him and let out a huge sigh as he drove away. I wrapped my arms tightly around myself and sat back down, doing my best to keep from shaking. Roan had been so unaffected, and I was trying to project his confidence onto myself, but truth be told, I was scared shitless.

 

When a police cruiser pulled up, I gave my statement and retrieved my purse and its contents that Steller had strewn around. Roan had left me his keys to bring his massive truck back to Murphy’s and the police were taking care of Steller. I promised the officer to meet him back at the station before getting in and driving off, ready to cleanse myself of the whole ordeal.

 

 

* * *

 

 

After finishing up at the police station and receiving my very first apprehension receipt, I made my way back to Murphy’s office. I had a cheque that I needed him to write and some things I needed to get off my chest. It was before five which meant he’d still be in, and I was ready to vent. I pulled into his lot and marched through the door, setting the bell off to alert him of my presence.

 

When Murphy emerged from his office, I was spinning in Emori’s chair, trying to pass the time. After the afternoon I’d had, my legs felt like jelly and I was grateful for the opportunity to just sit and reflect for a second.

 

“What the hell are you doing here?” He asked, though there was no malice in his voice. His eyes were focused on a stack of papers he was carry and he looked about ready to lock up and leave.

 

“I made an apprehension,” I told him.

 

“Get out,” he chuckled. “That’s a good one though, Princess.”

 

“I’m serious Murphy,” I told him. “I need you to cut me and Roan a cheque.”

 

“That explains it,” he said. “You got Roan to do your dirty work and now your here to reap the rewards.”

 

I clench my fists and took a deep breath in order to ignore him. Murphy was the least professional person I knew, and though he was technically my boss, that didn’t stop him from being obnoxious and ignorant. In his defense, he didn’t know that Roan had just been shot, but it didn’t really matter to me. It was just as offensive that he considered me incapable of doing this job without help even if it was true.

 

“I need to talk to you about the Blake case.” I cut right to the chase. It had been bothering me since I’d left Steller’s apartment building in Roan’s truck. If I learned anything from today, it was that I was sorely underprepared for this job and completely in the dark about what was actually going on in Seattle. 

 

Murphy let out a groan and pinched his nose like he’d been expecting this. “I gave you a week Clarke,” he reminded me. He glanced up at the calendar, though it was a pointless act since it was three months behind. “You’ve still got,” he paused while he did the math in his head. “Hell, you’ve only got two more days, then we can both move on from this and pretend it never happened.”

 

“I need more time,” I insisted.

 

“You can’t have it,” he told me.

 

“A week was an impossible timeframe,” I argued. “I’ve never done this before and Blake is a pro. You set me up to fail.”

 

“Roan would have brought him in in a day,” Murphy said.

 

“Roan is an ex-marine,” I scoffed. “And has also been a bail bonds officer for longer than I’ve been out of high school. It’s not a fair comparison and you know that.”

 

“Okay, so you’re not Roan, but you’re still not good enough to bring in Blake no matter how much time I give you.” Murphy said. “I can’t afford to have you play pretend anymore.”

 

Ouch. It was the truth, but it wasn’t fun to hear it vocalized.

 

“Come on, Murphy,” I said, trying, and failing, to not sound whiny. “I’m trying! You can’t really expect me to be good off the bat.  If our friendship means anything, you’ll let me stay on this.”  


“We’re not friends,” he reminded me, which was true. “There isn’t enough time in the world for you to be good enough to bring in Blake. I’m sorry Princess, but the answer is no. In two days time, you’ll be handing in those files and leaving this case the hell alone.”

 

“What’s your problem?” I demanded. Irritation was starting to rise inside me. Murphy and I were never close—never had been friends and it was likely that we never would be—and while he was a total dick 90% of the time, he wasn’t unreasonable. I didn’t think I’d made that bad of an argument. “You don’t even have anyone else who wants to work on this.”

 

“There are more people who work for me than Roan and Emori, you know.”

 

“Then why aren’t they scrambling at the chance to make ten thousand bucks?”

 

“It’s none of your business,” he snapped. “Besides, I never thought a princess like you would care about ten thousand dollars so much. Isn’t that chump change in comparison to your trust fund?”

 

With my back already up, I was about to snarl something vicious back at him before my mind comprehended what he’d just said. “What did you just call me?” I asked.

 

“Trust fund baby,” Murphy said with a shrug. “You were back in college and I’d be surprised if someone as uptight as you managed to spend it all in a matter of years.”

 

“No, not that, asshole,” I snapped. “You keep calling me Princess,” I noted.

 

“I called you _a_ _princess_ ,” Murphy said, making the distinction important. There was a chance that I was making things up, but I could have sworn I saw his shoulders tense. Murphy was not usually a tense man. The most apt comparison that had ever been made about him was to that of a house cat. He was lanky and stretched out about as far as humanly possible and more relaxed than what seemed natural for a man of his griminess. Most people like him would be worried about their debts coming to bite them in the ass, but Murphy moved through life like he didn’t have a care in the world.

 

“I can only think of a handful of people who have used that nickname,” I told him, trying to look casual. “If I didn’t know any better, I’d say you picked that up from someone specific. Maybe from someone who doesn’t want to be found.”

 

“This whole mysterious act doesn’t suit you, Griffin,” he said, putting an emphasis on my last name like it was a curse word. “People called you Princess all over UW campus, in case you don’t remember. Old habits die hard.”

 

“No, the only person at that school who called me that was Bellamy,” I insisted. “If I didn’t know any better, which I don’t, I’d say that you’re working really hard at keeping people from looking for him considering the fact that you’ve got $100 000 on the line.”

 

“What are you trying to say?” Murphy asked, his eyes narrowed.

 

“I’m just saying that it’s all really convenient,” I said simply, glancing at my nails like I wasn’t internally freaking out. If my hunch was right, then Murphy might know more than he was letting on.

 

“Spit it out, Griffin.”

 

Gathering up all my courage, and all my pride incase I was wrong, I blurted it out all at once, “Are you working with Bellamy?”

 

I expected him to get angry with me, throw me out, tell me to never come back. To my surprise, he kept his calm.

 

“What’s it to you?” He asked. He turned his back towards me and started shuffling through his stack of papers. If it was supposed to make me less suspicious, it didn’t work. Murphy was acting shady, or at least more so than normal.

 

I stared at him incredulously and had a horrible sinking feeling in my stomach as things started lining up. “I’m such an idiot,” I growled before rubbing a hand over my face. “You’ve been playing me this whole time!”

 

“I wouldn’t call it playing—”

 

“Then what the hell would you call it!” I exclaimed. “God, I knew you thought me doing this job was a joke, but I didn’t realize how much. So you bailed Bellamy out and kept your agents off his case and in return…? What exactly do you get out of this?”

 

“That’s not what’s going on,” Murphy insisted. “Well,” he added, turning to me sheepishly. “Not entirely.”

 

“You better start talking Murphy or I’m turning you in as an accessory to a crime,” I threatened. “And Emori and Roan too if they’re apart of this.”

 

“They’re not! And it’s not what you think,” he assured me. “I mean, yeah, I bailed Blake out and promised to keep my guys off his back for a set amount of time. He asked for enough time to work the Wallace case and if it didn’t lead anywhere, he promised to turn himself in.”

 

“And Emori and Roan just happened to have no interest in bringing him in?”

 

“Emori knew that he and I were friends, and she’s trying to get out of the game anyways, so she didn’t take the case. Roan had no interest in it from the start. Something about Blake being too easy,” Murphy explained.

 

“And having me work this case was what? A good laugh between you and Bellamy?”

 

“You’re the one who insisted on taking it!” Murphy reminded me. “I told you that bond enforcement wasn’t a good fit for you—which I was right about by the way—but you’re too stubborn to accept the truth.”

 

“I was proving a point!”

 

“Well you certainly proved that you’re the worst goddamn bond enforcement agent in the whole damn world!”

 

I shook my head and rolled my eyes before returning to glaring daggers at him. “So the only people who knew about your arrangement with Bellamy were you and him,” I asked.

 

“Hand to God,” Murphy promised, placing his right hand over his heart like it meant anything.

 

“You still haven’t told me what you get out of this deal,” I told him. John Murphy wasn’t exactly a hard man to read. He never did anything if it didn’t benefit him in someway, and as it were, I still couldn’t figure out how his deal with Bellamy benefited him.

 

“Do I need a reason to want a crime family taken down?” He asked me with a shrug. “Plus, if I didn’t help him, Bellamy would already be dead.”

 

“I didn’t realize you cared,” I drawled, voice dripping with sarcasm. “What’s the real answer, Murphy?”

 

“None of your damn business,” he spat at me.

 

“I think it might be considering I have all the leverage here,” I reminded him.

 

“You’ve got no proof that I’m working with Bellamy.”

 

“I don’t care if you get charged with anything,” I told him. “Something tells me that being a person of interest in an open police investigation won’t be too good for business. Everyone knows that a bond officer is a crook, but no one trusts one who gets caught.”

 

“You’re bluffing,” he told me. “Blackmail is a worse crime than bailing out a friend who happened to go FTA.”

 

“Try me then,” I told him, opening my phone and dialing the direct line to the nearest police station. “Something tells me that you’ve got a way to contact Blake that the police will be more than happy to use in their favor.”

 

“So what, I tell you why I helped my friend and you don’t turn me in?” Murphy asked me skeptically. “No way, what do you actually want, Griffin?”

 

I smirked at him. “You’re right,” I told Murphy. “I don’t give a shit about why you did it. Let’s say you do have a way to contact Bellamy, I might be interested in you setting up a meeting with him and then conveniently not showing up.”

 

“Not gonna happen,” Murphy told me. “I might as well have you turn me in right now if you’re just going to ambush Bellamy and bring him in anyway.”

 

“I’m not turning him over to the police,” I said.

 

“Bullshit,” Murphy scoffed.

 

“I’m serious!” I insisted.

 

“Thought you wanted that $10 000?”

 

“I did. I do,” I said. “But I want the Wallaces taken down more.”

 

Murphy rolled his eyes at me.

 

“I do,” I implored. “And I know you want that too, just like Bellamy and whoever else is working with him. I can keep digging into it on my own, or I can get in touch with Blake.”

 

“You really expect me to believe you’re giving up on bringing Blake in for that $10 0000 and ready to join his Scooby Gang?”

 

“Who said anything about giving up the money?” I asked. “I’m gonna help Bellamy bring the Wallces down, and when we’re done, I’ll march his ass down to the station and get my goddamn cheque. It’s that simple.”

 

“You’ve got it all figured out then. Do you really think you’re going to help him? You think you’ve got anything to add, and that Bellamy fucking Blake is going to let you?” Murphy asked with a smirk. “You’re even more delusional than I realized.”

 

“It doesn’t matter what you think of me,” I snapped. “I want in on this and you’re going to help me.”

 

“You promise you won’t turn around and call the cops once I arrange to meet with Bellamy? At least not until he’s ready.”

 

“Cross my heart and hope to die,” I said, miming an X over my heart.

 

“Fine, I’ll do it, but if anything happens and I get caught, you’re going down with me, Griffin,” Murphy promised me. “You’re in on this now.”

 

“Yeah, yeah, I get it,” I said.

 

“And when Blake turns your ass away, don’t come crawling to me to convince him,” Murphy continued. “I’m warning you now and that’s it; he’s not going to work with you.”

 

“We’ll see about that,” I said. “Just get him to meet and leave it to me.”

 

“Whatever you say, Princess.”

 

“One last thing,” I said to Murphy before walking out of the office.

 

“Haven’t I done enough for you? Blake is going to kill me when he sees you.”

 

“After this, I’ll leave you alone,” I promised. “I brought Roan’s truck back here for him, so it just so happens that I’m short a vehicle. I’ve got a feeling that you’ve got more than one to spare.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> That's it for now, folks! I can't make any definitely promises, but I will say that I've got the next few chapters roughed out. I will say that there won't be as long a gap between this chapter and the next as there was last time. Cross my heart and hope to die. 
> 
> Comments and Kudos are always appreciated! Let me know how you're liking it so far :)


	6. Chapter 6

* * *

 

I dangled the keys to Murphy’s Jeep Cherokee in my hands as I walked through the parking lot looking for it. After convincing him (i.e. blackmailing him) to get Emori to pick him up, it was easy enough to get him to lend me the car for the day.

“I swear to God if there’s one speck of dirt,” he warned me.

“I’ll bring it back good as new,” I assured him. I even planned to bring it through the carwash once I got my Mini back.

It was the perfect cover vehicle for sneaking up on Blake since he was already expecting it at the spot Murphy had arranged to meet at. Earlier in the day, Raven had spotted Blake on a red light camera in a light beige Toyota Corolla looking as inconspicuous as he possibly could in a dark ball cap, a black hoodie and a pair of aviators, so I knew what to look for as I pulled into the parking lot. I parked at the back and cranked the seat all the way down as I waited for Bellamy to arrive. I didn’t want him to spot me in the driver’s seat and spook.

The meeting place was generic, but not too secluded. Murphy had explained that they didn’t usually go for abandoned places as to not raise any suspicions. According to him, nobody met in abandoned lots or back alleys, which was news to me. Apparently, TV and movies had been lying to me my entire life. The people who frequented Taco Bell parking lots weren’t usually on the lookout for runaway fugitives, which made it the perfect spot to meet with one. I didn’t argue with it, nor did I really care too much about the theory behind it. If this was normal for Blake, then that’s all that mattered to me. If I got a burrito as an extra bonus, I wouldn’t complain.

I clocked Bellamy as soon as he pulled into the parking lot. If I didn't know the exact make and model he was driving, I wouldn't have though. His cover was working for the most part except for the fact that it made him look super shady. I watched him ditch the sunglasses before he checked his reflection in the rearview mirror. Unsure of what to do next, I let Bellamy take the lead. He’d spotted Murphy’s Jeep and probably assumed that Murphy was waiting for him inside. I watched him glance around before strolling towards me and the car. Pressing myself further down against the driver’s seat, I started to panic. If Bellamy saw me before I got out, he might bolt before I had the chance to talk to him, but if I hopped out now, he might run.

It was Sophie's choice, so I decided to hold onto the tentative control I had over the situation and opened the door. I stepped out of Murphy’s Jeep. “Surprised to see me, Blake?” I asked as I faced him.

The look on his face was one I wish I’d been able to capture with a camera. Shock, realization, anger, and panic crossed his it in just the flash of a second before he turned quickly and wordlessly power walked away from me.

“Wait!” I called after him, jogging to catch up. My short legs took nearly three strides to Bellamy’s one. “I just want to talk.”

“I don’t know what’s going on, but I sure as hell know that’s not the case” he growled at me. His eyes were scanning the parking lot for police as he made his way to his Toyota.

“I haven’t called the cops,” I assured him. “And I don’t plan to.”

“How stupid do you think I am, Princess?”

“Considering the fact that you’re working with John Murphy and you’re not doing too much to conceal it, I’d say pretty fucking stupid.”

“What did you just say to me?” He snapped, whipping around to face me. Clearly, his anger with me outweighed his fear of getting caught by the police who weren’t on their way.

“You really think I’m the only one who’s going to be able to put that one together? Murphy’s a lot of things, but trustworthy isn’t one of them.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” he told me.

“Really?” I drawled. “How do you think I got you to meet here? I showed up with Murphy’s car for Christ’s sake. I know that you two are working together, so you might as well own up to.”

His eyes narrowed and he glanced back over at Murphy’s Jeep to confirm its existence. He was likely trying to put holes in what I was telling him, but there was nothing to debunk. I was in on it now, whether he liked it or not.

“I’d hardly call it working together,” Bellamy finally admitted.

“If you consider letting someone go FTA with a hundred grand on the line not working together, then you must have some pretty high standards,” I told him. We stared at each other coolly for a beat, neither one of us wanting to be the first to break. The scrutiny of his stare made my skin crawl and I had the desperate urge to tuck a stray strand of my hair out of my face, but I wouldn't dare move. I was worried any sudden movements might spook him like a wild animal.

“This was fun,” he finally said without warning, breaking the staring contest before turning away and making his way towards his car again. “I’m sure you feel very smart and proud of yourself, but I can’t stick around.”

“I already told you,” I said exasperated. “I didn’t call the cops!”

“And I already told you that I don’t believe you,” he replied. “Even if you’re telling the truth, I don’t have time for this.”

“All I’m asking for is ten minutes!” I insisted. “If you don’t give me that, I’ll go straight to the police with what I know about Murphy and get him in a whole lot of trouble.”

He stopped just in front of his car door, making no move to open it. “Blackmail isn’t a good color on you, Princess.”

“If you’d just be reasonable, I wouldn’t have to do it.”

“And if you were really as smart as you thought you were, you’d realize that I don’t give a shit who finds out about Murphy,” he said with a shrug. He still didn’t make a move to leave.

“Bullshit,” I scoffed. “I don’t know if you and Murphy are friends, but I know you’re not about to let him go down for helping you out.”

He sighed heavily, his hand hovering over the door handle to the Corolla. I could practically hear the gears shifting in his head trying to decide whether it was worth it or not.

“How do I know that you haven’t already called the cops and aren’t just using this to keep me from running?”

“If I’d called the cops on you, I wouldn’t have approached you by myself. You would have pulled in and been ambushed,” I explained. “The fact that we’ve been here this long is enough proof that I’m telling the truth.”

“How the hell did you convince Murphy to play along with this little game of yours?” He asked, shaking his head. His hand dropped from the car door and he turned back around and leaned his back against it.

“Let’s just say I made a very convincing argument.”

“So you blackmailed him too, huh?” He asked, raising his eyebrows.

“It’s Murphy’s own damn fault for making it so obvious,” I said defensively. “Once I put it together that he didn’t actually want you found, I had all the leverage.”

“Guess I was wrong about you,” Bellamy said.

“How so?”

“Blackmail might be your color after all.”

I rolled my eyes at him and he stepped away from his car towards the restaurant. I followed him into the building and he went to get a booth while I ordered at the counter.

“Really, Princess?” He asked when I diverted away from him.

“What? I’m hungry!” I snapped. “Besides, we can’t just sit in here without ordering.

He shook his head at me and walked away. With a shrug, I figured that was as good as agreement and ordered my burrito before sitting down across from him.

“Okay, talk or whatever,” Bellamy said. “But unless you’re here to tell me you’re dropping this whole thing or that I’m about to get arrested, nothing you can say will really interest me.”

“Then consider yourself disinterested,” I told him. “I’m not dropping it and I already told you that I’m not planning on getting you arrested. At least, not yet.”

“What does that mean?”

“I understand that you’ve got people working with you to bring the Wallaces down,” I said. “I want in.”

By the look on his face, I almost thought he hadn’t heard what I said.

“I already know that you’ve got Miller working with you,” I continued. “Murphy’s obviously in the loop, and I assume you know where Maya is. You’ve probably got a few other people who are contributing, but I don’t know your circles well enough to identify them. We’ve been working on this separately, and I figure we might as well pool our resources.”

“Pool our resources?” He repeated, shooting me an incredulous look.

“Yes,” I said slowly. “You’ve clearly hit a wall, and I’m limited in what I can research on my own. I’ve got a friend helping me and I’m pretty familiar with the type of crimes the Wallaces likely have their hands in but—”

“I’m gonna stop you right there,” Bellamy told me, holding his hand up. “There’s no pooling of anything. There’s no team and there’s no investigation as far as you’re concerned. I’ve told you more times than I can count that you need to keep a 100-mile radius from the Wallaces if you value your life and the lives of the people you care about. Stop trying to involve yourself.”

“We need to work together.”

“There’s no we! Nothing you say will change that.”

“Why not? Because I’m not a police officer?” I asked him. “I’m telling you, I can be useful. I’ve already figured out this much on my own. Imagine what we could do if we just worked together.”

“You’re delusional,” Bellamy scoffed. When he noticed the determined look in my eye, he added, “You’re untrained, unqualified and stupid enough to pursue this as long as you have which means you’re reckless too. There’s nothing you could tell me or contribute that would actually be of use to me.”

“Tell me how you really feel,” I grumbled.

“What exactly did you expect, Clarke?” He growled at me. “That I’d clap my hands and start working on a friendship bracelet with you to officially welcome you to a team that doesn’t officially exist?”

“I figured you’d need some convincing,” I told him. “If you’d just trust me—”

“Trust you? I don’t even know you.”

“You know me well enough,” I argued.

“Just because I’ve seen you naked doesn’t mean I can trust you.”

“That’s not what I’m saying.”

“Then what are you saying!” Bellamy exclaimed. “I’m getting pretty tired of having you pop up out of nowhere and derail my plans.”

“I wouldn’t pop up out of nowhere if you’d work with me.”

“It’s not gonna happen, Princess,” Bellamy said.

“Why not?” I whined.

“You really want to know?” He asked.

I nodded.

He shook his head slightly and sighed. “Other than the fact that you’re the worst bounty hunter I’ve ever seen, your lack of experience and knowledge in this field makes you a liability. I don’t think you’re stupid, but you don’t have what it takes to work on this. You won’t be useful. You’ll just get in the way.”

“I told you before, I know organized crime,” I explained. “I’ve seen money laundering up close. I know how it’s done.”

“So does anyone with a computer and a wifi connection,” Bellamy countered. “It’s nothing we don’t already have covered.”

“It’s not the same,” I told him.

“It doesn’t matter,” Bellamy said and stood up from the booth. “Go find a charity that needs a generous donation or an animal shelter that needs new dog beds because taking down the Wallaces isn’t your ticket to a good deed done.”

I reached out a grabbed a hold of his forearm loosely, stopping him from walking away. “You’re making a mistake. You need my help.”

“I don’t need anything from you, Princess,” he said and added, “I got everything I wanted from you a long time ago.”

I snatched my hand back from him as if it were burned and turned my head away towards the window. “You made your point,” I snapped.

“I’m sorry,” he said softly.

“No you’re not,” I scoffed turning back to face him, but he was already walking out of the restaurant. After I was certain he was out of the parking lot, I stood up and followed, not even realizing until I was halfway home that I’d left without taking my food with me.

 

* * *

  

Still infuriated after meeting with Bellamy, I couldn’t bring myself to pull into the parking lot of my apartment. I wasn’t in the mood to sit and stew at home; I needed action, but of what kind, I didn’t really know. I could hear Raven’s voice in my head suggestively telling me exactly the kind of action I needed, but that wasn’t it. What I needed was answers and I thought Bellamy had been my ticket to that. I’d obviously been wrong.

As I drove, I contemplated my options. Option one was to let this all go and get back to my life and start applying for regular jobs like a normal 24-year-old woman. I had just a few months before starting medical school, and once September hit, I’d hardly have time to track down skips and bring them into the clink. It was the logical thing to do. It was the respectable thing to do. The fact that I’d even tried being an apprehension agent would probably give my mother a stroke, which was all the more reason I couldn’t give up. Granted, I wasn’t really bounty hunting anymore and the fact that it would mortify my mother wasn’t really the reason I was doing it, but it was definitely an added bonus.

Option one wasn’t even really an option, at least not to me. Bellamy could try to shove that down my throat all he wanted, I was in this with or without him. The way I saw it, my only other option was throwing myself into an actual investigation. At the moment, I had the added advantage of no one actually taking me seriously and I was determined enough that I figured I might actually get somewhere with it.

I needed information though. I’d been banking on Bellamy filling in the massive gaps of knowledge I had, but since that wasn’t about to happen I needed to start working out who the big players were other than the Wallaces, and what exactly it was that they were playing for. Other than knowing that the Wallaces were shady, I didn’t know much else. I needed to figure out who they were working with and where exactly they were making all the money they were moving around.

I also wanted to figure out who Bellamy was working with. There wasn’t really a justification I could think of for that other than my own curiosity. I wanted to know the type of person he’d be willing to work with. He’d been so opposed to teaming up with me and I couldn’t deny that it bothered me. How could it not bother me? Getting rejected by Bellamy Blake wasn’t exactly a new experience for me, but it stung just as much as it had the first time.

Though I’d been driving aimlessly, I started to recognize the streets as I drove past them. It didn’t surprise me that I’d ended up in Raven’s neighborhood. Our regular plans for Sunday night were still on, but that was still a few days away and I needed to talk to her. We weren’t really the type of friends who showed up unannounced at each other’s place, but we also weren’t the type of friends who would ever turn the other away. Crossing my fingers that she didn’t have Wick over and that they weren’t getting it on, I made my way up to her apartment. She answered her door after just one knock which was a good sign that she wasn’t busy.

When she saw me, she looked taken aback for just a moment before stepping aside and letting me in. “Where the hell have you been? She asked me as I took my shoes off.

“Working,” I said defensively.

“I haven’t heard from you in two days and that’s the best you’ve got?” She asked me, one hand on her hip.

It was my turn to look taken aback. “We’ve gone longer than that without speaking before,” I reminded her. “What’s go you so wound up?”

“I don’t know, maybe it’s the fact that working for you means putting your life in danger as of late,” she snapped. “How am I supposed to know you’re not dead in a ditch somewhere if you're not going to answer when I text you?”

I gave her a quizzical look before glancing down at my phone. For the first time all day, I noticed the red bubble next to the SMS app on my phone. When I opened it up, there were a few unread texts from Raven that started out with an update about my car and ended with a request for confirmation of my safety.

“I’m so sorry Ray,” I told her. “I’ve had a lot going on, but that’s not an excuse.”

“It sure as hell isn’t,” she said angrily. “I’m trying to be cool and let you make your own decisions without passing major judgment onto them, but it’s a lot, Clarke.”

“I’ll be better about keeping you in the loop,” I promised.

“Literally a single word text would have been better than leaving me thinking the worst,” she told me.

“I guess this was a bad time to come over to ask for a favor,” I said sheepishly.

She rolled her eyes and sighed at me, but I could tell it was playful. She’d said her piece and I’d listened and meant what I’d said. The least I could do was try to keep Raven informed, especially when I was going to show up unannounced and in need of advice. “I already told you that I don’t mind helping if that means you get closer to finishing this,” she said.

“Then I’ve got a lot to catch you up on,” I warned her.

“How much could there be in just two days?” She asked incredulously and I shot her a pointed look.

Between working with Roan, getting him shot, uncovering Murphy’s role in Bellamy’s plan and just now meeting with Bellamy at a Taco Bell of all places, there was a lot to catch up on. More than Raven could probably have imagined. I nearly forgot to mention that I’d commandeered Murphy’s Jeep in exchange for not turning him in. It wasn’t until prompted that I filled her in.

“How the hell has all this gone down when you haven’t even had a car to get around in? You're telling me you took the bus to go meet Blake?” She asked me. We’d both wordless decided to crack a bottle of wine, as we do when we’re having a girl’s night, and the giggling fit that ensued after she posed the bus question was perhaps somewhat alcohol induced.

“I didn’t take the fucking bus okay?” I told her. “Murphy gave me his Jeep.” I pulled the fob to Murphy’s car out of my pocket and held them up to her.

“No fucking way!” Raven exclaimed. “How did you manage that?”

“It’s amazing what you can convince a person to do once you uncover their secret illegal involvements.”

“Clarke Griffin, have you become a bonafide badass?” Raven asked, squinting her eyes at me.

I scoffed at the mere thought. It was like she hadn’t heard the part where I’d literally handed my gun over to a criminal or the part about Bellamy leaving me high and dry in a Taco Bell. I didn’t feel like a badass, more like a total loser who hadn’t learned how to let things go. That’s why Raven was my best friend though, and that’s why I needed to see her. I needed her to back me up and support me even when I what I was doing was borderline insane.

“So what do you need me to help with?” She asked out of the blue.

I spluttered. “What?”

“You said you came here needing a favor,” she reminded me. “So what is it?”

“The favor was letting me rant about my life and what a shitshow it is,” I said.

“It’s only a shitshow because you’re insisting on making it one,” she said. “And that’s a dumb favor to ask. You don’t need to ask my permission to vent to me. It’s in the terms and conditions of our friendship.”

I mulled it over for a second. When I’d asked Raven for help before, we’d found out that Maya was an informant which had been a major piece to the puzzle. It had explained why she’d phoned Bellamy that night and why she’d gone into hiding. And that was all from just a few minutes of digging on Raven’s part.

“This is my thing, Raven,” I told her. As much as it would help to have a second set of hands working the case, I didn’t want to risk Raven’s safety any more than I already had. It was one thing to put myself in the line of fire, it was an entirely different thing to involve her. If she was already working herself into a panic about my safety now, I didn’t want to think about what she would do if she knew exactly how dangerous the Wallaces were. If I let her dig any further, she would be fully confronted with all the dirty details instead of my censored overview.

“And I’m offering my help,” she argued. “You already agreed to it once, so stop making such a big deal out of this and accept it.”

“I reluctantly accepted your help and that was just looking into Bellamy,” I said. “Investigating the Wallaces is an entirely different horse.”

“All you’ve done the past hour is complain about how Bellamy Blake keeps making decisions for you and blocking you out because he won’t accept that it’s your choice whether or not something is too dangerous or too much for you to handle,” she said stubbornly. “Don’t do the same thing to me.”

“The difference is that you’re only getting involved as an extension of me,” I retorted. “It’s not a choice you would make if I weren’t already doing this.”

“Maybe not,” she agreed. “But it’s naive of you to think that I’m not already in danger just by association with you.”

I flinched at the thought, but had to admit she was right. Enough people had hammered into my brain just how reckless I was being. It wasn’t just my life I was endangering, whether or not that was my intention.

“We need to work together, Clarke,” Raven said, echoing the speech I’d given to Bellamy just a few hours prior. “Let me help you.”

I rolled my eyes at her and broke out into a smile. After years of friendship, I knew well enough that Raven Reyes wasn’t a woman who accepted rejection. She was the smartest, most talented and competent woman I knew and I would be lucky to have her putting 100% of herself into this.

“Fine,” I caved. “But your role is completely behind the scenes. Cage Wallace might know about our friendship, but I’ll be damned if he knows your directly involved now.”

“Obviously,” Raven said with a shrug. “If anything, we want him to think that you’ve completely let this go so you’re off his radar entirely.”

We abandoned our glasses of wine in favor of water and I prepared to tell Raven everything I knew that I hadn’t already told her, which granted wasn’t very much. The limited knowledge I had of Dante and Cage Wallace was mostly what I learned from Roan and Wells.

“So basically,” I finished. “I don’t know what exactly their business is and I don’t really know who they’re working with. I don’t even have any proof that there is anything shady going on, but I feel it, you know?”

“I might be able to help with that,” Raven said sheepishly. I gave her a quizzical look and she ducked her head. “I don’t have any hard evidence, but I was browsing through some of the server files at Wells’ firm—”

“Raven, what the fuck?” I interrupted incredulously. “You promised not to look into the Wallaces!”

“Yeah, and you promised to tell me what you were up to!”

“I did tell you!”

“You only told me parts of the truth!” She argued. “It was my prerogative to find out exactly what you’d gotten yourself into.”

“You’re unbelievable,” I scoffed.

“Oh shut up, you love me,” Raven insisted.

“I tolerate you,” I corrected her.

“Then maybe I shouldn’t tell you what I dug up,” she said. “Since, if you had it your way, I wouldn’t have found it in the first place.”

“Fine, I’ll let it go,” I sighed. “Even though you lied to my face.”

She shot me a look and I gestured that I was over it. It was enough to convince her and she continued. “Okay, so it’s not much,” she started. “But I’ve been scouring over their billings. I haven’t saved anything to my hard drive because that would be a big red flag if their IT caught me. I can’t have them tracing back to my IP.”

“Did you find anything in there?”

“If they're inflating their billable hours, we wouldn’t really be able to tell, but I did notice something interesting,” she explained. “Have you ever heard of Mount Weather Inc?”

By the look on my face, she could tell that I hadn’t.

“That name comes up each month in the firm’s expenses. They’re paying out massive sums to this company. I’m talking millions annually.”

“Is there any connection to the Wallaces?” I asked. “Is Mount Weather Inc, even a real business?”

“From what I can find, it looks like a shell company based out of Geneva. There’s a website for it but it doesn’t list any information about what the company actually does.” Raven typed the address into the search bar and pulled up a site with a picture of a snow-capped mountain as a header. The only text displayed was Mount Weather Incorporated.

“This website makes this whole Mount Weather thing look even worse,” I scoffed. “There’s got to be something we’re missing that makes this company look passably legitimate and not just a way to move money or the IRS would be all over this.”

“That’s just it though,” Raven said. “Couldn’t we just call in a tip to the IRS and have them do the rest? All it would take is a glance at their balance sheet and this would blow up in their face.”

I mulled it over for a second. In theory, it was a great idea. If we could avoid dragging this out any longer, that would be ideal, but it was too easy. “We still don’t know if there’s a direct link from MW Inc to the Wallaces,” I reminded Raven. “And there’s no guarantee that the IRS would actually investigate them. They’ve got a lot of influence.”

“You think Dante Wallace has influence over people all the way up to the federal level?” Raven asked.

“I don’t know,” I said honestly. “Which is why we can’t make big moves until we have more information.”

“It’s out there,” Raven said confidently. “People who are confident they won’t get caught get sloppy. If I can find this with some surface digging, I can find more.”

“We have to be careful though,” I told her. “If Tsing’s IT department even suspects that—”

“They’ll never see me,” Raven assured me. “I cover my tracks.”

“Did you just say that over-confidence leads to making mistakes?” I asked her, raising my eyebrows. “I’m not saying you should stop looking, I’m just saying that we take a cautious approach and assume everything we do is trackable. We need to hone in on the most important information that we need now in case we do get noticed and need to act fast.”

“Okay,” Raven agreed. “So what do you want to start with?”

“We need to know who’s under Dante Wallace’s thumb so that when we do find something on him, we know who not bring it to.”

“I’ll sift through Tsing’s files and see if I can crack into any of the servers that Wallace’s company or Mount Weather Inc operates on.”

“They’ve got a charity as well,” I mentioned to her. “It might be a good idea to look into who has made any significant donations.”

“What about you? You need to lay low since Cage is already suspicious of you.”

“I’m being careful,” I told her.

“Something tells me that your version of careful is different from mine,” Raven said skeptically.

“I can’t just go underground, Raven,” I said. “That would make me look like I had something to hide.”

“You do,” Raven said.

“Exactly,” I said. “Which is why Cage would never expect me putting myself underneath a microscope.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

I shot her a smirk. “I’m about to re-enter the world I was raised to be a part of,” I told her.

Raven let out a groan. “This is a bad idea.”

“This is the only way we get the information we need.”

“I’m working on getting the files. We’ll have more than enough to—”

“It’s not the same,” I interrupted. “There’s only so much we can infer from a screen, Raven. This way, I can keep an eye on Cage and track who he’s involved with on a personal level.”

“This is only going to put an even bigger target on your back.”

“I’ve thought it through already,” I argued. “Cage Wallace isn’t suspicious of me because he thinks I’m onto him. His ego is too big for that. He’s suspicious because I was investigating Bellamy and he wants to get to him first. This won’t set off any red flags for him, I’m sure of it.”

Raven gave me a look that told me that she was completely unsure of it.

“You’re a dog with a bone, you know that Griffin?”

“At least I’m on the right side of this one,” I said with a sigh.

Raven looked at me quizzically, but didn't fight me any further.

 

The drive home from Raven’s was short. Lost in thought, I nearly drove past my apartment building again before making a turn that was far too sharp. I cringed at the thought of Murphy seeing how I was driving his jeep. What he didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him though.

When I got up to my apartment, I flopped onto my bed feeling drained. Just a few hours ago, I couldn’t imagine being calm enough for sleep and now my eyes could barely stay open. Without changing clothes or even washing my face, I was completely out in a matter of minutes and grateful for the much-needed rest. Tomorrow was going to be the start of the next phase and I was going to need every ounce of energy I could muster.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you again for sticking with this story! I'm really excited about where things are going and am hoping to have more time to write in the coming weeks. 
> 
> Comments and kudos are always appreciated!


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